Jennie Guy
Magnetic Fields
Thinking Visual is an initiative of Wicklow County Council Arts Office, managed by the Mermaid Arts Centre and supported by the Arts Council, where secondary school students experience contemporary visual art by meeting and working directly with professional artists.
John Beattie moving-image workshop.
Jennie Guy and Sven Anderson introducing a sound workshop.
In 2015, Jennie Guy – curator of Art School – developed two projects featuring five artists for Thinking Visual: Playing with Elaine Leader and Sarah Pierce in Blessington Community College and Magnetic Fields with Sven Anderson, John Beattie, and Michael West in Scoil Chonglais Baltinglass.
Magnetic Fields took place in Scoil Chonglais Baltinglass in November 2015, working with art teacher Anne Deeney Walker, English teacher Thomas Ahern and their students meeting with two artists and writer for two full-day workshop sessions each. Magnetic Fields explored the Surrealist process of the exquisite corpse, developing a working environment in which the students created fragments of imagery, texture, and narrative, exploring collective authorship and learning about the collaborative and at times unpredictable nature of many contemporary creative processes.
Video documentation for Magnetic Fields.
John Beattie explored the space of the school as the ‘set/stage/studio’, guiding students through a variety of process-based methods that focused on the construction of still and moving images to create narrative and meaning.
John Beattie moving-image workshop.
Michael West used writing to explore heightening perceptions, improving observation skills and precision of expression, working with the students through written formats as diverse as Haiku and Imagist poetry.
Michael West writing workshop.
Sven Anderson worked with the students through the medium of sound, capturing field recordings of the school and then developing student-conducted sound performances using books, radios, and other found objects to produce abstract audio collages.
Sven Anderson sound workshop.