This is how you write an artist's statement!

The following is an artists' statement by Senior infants and 1^st class boys from Scoil na mBuachailli in Clonakilty who are exhibiting two excellent felt pieces in our current exhibition, Abecedary

We had lots of ideas after our visit to the Alphabet exhibition in Skibbereen so it took some time to agree on the medium which we chose.

There are 23 boys in our class.  Each boy chose a letter.  The remaining letters were done in groups except for one letter which we left out!  We thought it would be a challenge to spot the missing letter!

Next each child created an image that reminded them of that letter for example; one boy Ethan said “I thought of science and stuff, and then I said what begins with G, in science and that made me think of galaxy!” 

Conor, Ethan and Oliver’s interpretation of E was as follows;  “First of all it started with elephant because we like elephants and then we thought about an egg and what an elephant could do with an egg, he could eat it, and then we thought of Ethan with big eyes eating the egg, then we said we would make the elephant look enormous and excited so we just couldn’t stop thinking of idea’s for E so we kept adding to it! It was fun!”

We took our artwork in stages;

Stage 1- We used paper and 3 crayons to draw our image.

Stage 2- We did cutting and sticking with paper to make the same image,

Stage 3- We used fabric and glue to create our scene and joined all the pieces together.

Stage 4- We used felt and sheep’s wool to create an image, some of us decided we wanted to do a new image using the wool and some of us did the exact same image again but it looked different with the wool!

Stage 5- We sewed them all together to make a felt quilt which we think looks amazing!

Here is another from 2nd class  pupils in Kilgarriffe National School in Clonakilty. Their piece is called Palindromes and is a work in mixed media on cardboard

This is their statement explaining their practice.  

For this art project the topic was the alphabet and we chose to do palindromes. For those of you who don't know what a palindrome is, it is a word or sentence that can be said and spelt forwards and backwards, for example 'race car' is a palindrome, just turn it around in your head and it is still 'race car'. Another example for a sentence is 'A nut for a jar of tuna', turn it around and it is still 'A nut for a jar of tuna'.

For the project we chose to do sentences instead of doing actual words. It took a lot of deliberation but we decided on these sentences: a nut for a jar of tuna, race fast safe car, stack cats, never odd or even, step on no pets, mad at adam, and mr owl ate metal worm. We each chose our favourite sentence. We wrote out our sentence on cardboard and then collaged each letter and the background with two primary and secondary complementary colours. We glued them to the cardboard with this super sticky glue and we then left them to dry overnight. We then sent them off to West Cork Arts Centre to go on the display.