To accompany their live stream of What Did I Miss? by Shaun Dunne as part of Brightening Air, The Ark embarked on a nationwide engagement project with 5th and 6th class groups in schools across Ireland.

These online workshops were a collaboration between me and illustrator Duffy Mooney-Sheppard. Through visual art and speechwriting prompts, we encouraged 5th and 6th class children to express, through art and words, their experiences of the pandemic and their feelings about coming to the end of another difficult school year or completing primary school at such a turbulent time.

In the workshop, the children created memory books which looked back at their primary school experiences. Through thinking about the past, present and future, the drawing and writing prompts equipped them to create graduation speeches.

Ms. Greene’s Fifth Class and I spent a number of weeks walking the Owenass river track in Mountmellick town. The project was based on slowing down, on thinking about our place in nature, and on tuning into our senses: looking, listening, feeling. It culminated in an exhibition of photography and poetry along the walk. 

Before we set out, we played visual scavenger hunts in the school yard, training our eyes to look at things in greater detail, to notice objects and elements in the environment we might at first overlook. We made handmade origami field journals in the classroom to collect our observations. We spent time photographing nature in close-up. Drawn from the observations and language bank they accumulated in their journals over the weeks, the boys’ wrote poems in a Japanese haiku-style, written to be read in a single breath. Their photographs invited viewers to get as close to nature as they did when composing them, to look in detail at things we might not see in our busy day-to-day lives.

In exhibiting their work, the boys hoped that other walkers might be inspired to slow down, to stop along the river, to notice something they had never noticed before, to feel like they were walking the path for the very first time.

In a residency that spanned a full academic year at the school, I facilitated a visual storytelling project with Fifth Class, in partnership with class teacher Caroline Greene and HSCL Miriam Geaney.

The project involved an initial child-led explorative period, discovering the history of and experimenting with techniques for creating non-verbal texts. The boys decided to focus the project on developing a photo-comic: writing, performing, designing and producing a magical realist graphic story centred on their school caretaker, dragons, and a secret portal beneath Mountmellick, all set against the backdrop of the 2018 Slieve Bloom mountain Fires.

We established a Writers Room, where the class worked collectively on the story they wanted to tell, collaborating to establish plot, settings, characters, actions.

We then explored storyboarding, experimenting with how to tell a story with only pictures, and encountering the different types of shots, foregrounding techniques etc. A team of students worked across the school site as actors, directors and camera crew, and a second team in the classroom worked as illustrators, background scenic artists and sound effect typographers.

Parents and families were invited to become actively involved, becoming actors in one of the scenes. Finally, in the Editing Room, the boys were introduced to Photoshop skills, where illustrations were merged with photographs and arranged into a comic grid.