28 January 2022
The age of Reason/Unreason Art Workshop – student report
From 6 October until 10 November last, we took part in an art exhibition workshop led by Deirdre Travers and Sonya Weston. In this workshop we discussed the world around us and the changes we would like to make. We were then encouraged to collaborate as a group and created four different manifestos focusing on women in society, equal rights, poverty and the environment. We chose these four topics because we felt strongly about the importance of these subjects.
Group 1:
Emily Culleton, Ciara Murphy, Caoimhe Byrne, Lauren Fowle, Isabelle Molloy, Carys Jones, Maeve Keegan, Aoife Devereux focused on consent as a human right and the sexualizing of women’s clothing. From this project some of the girls decided to form a committee focusing on women’s empowerment.
Group 2:
Anna Sinnott, Caitlin Hunt, Ellie Stafford, Meaghan Rossiter focused overall on women empowerment. From doing this poster the girls learnt that ‘there is no limit to what we as women can accomplish’- Michelle Obama.
Group 3:
Clodagh Doyle, Marta Goni, Rachel Kenna, Orla Griffin, Katelyn Durack focused on equal rights/poverty and education. The girl’s poster emphasized that jobs are not defined by your gender, and everyone has the right to education.
Group 4:
Emma O’Shea and Robyn Roche focused on the environment and the protection of women. This is very important now as a lot of women feel unsafe walking alone, due to current events that happened to Ashling Murphy and many more. It is ironic how this tragic event happened not long after we had completed this project. This helped us to have a stronger understanding of oppression to women today.
After the four groups completed their manifestos, they used social media to create a 30 second video to represent and showcase their ideas and each manifesto.
During this workshop we learned the importance of recognizing the many problems today and the importance of expressing these ideas in forms of art to bring awareness to these subjects. We also learned about many women in art. We learned how they were and still are looked down on in the world of art in comparison to male artists. We also discovered that many female artists did not get the recognition they deserved until well after their time. We gained a lot of knowledge from this workshop, some of the girls even took their manifestos further into setting up their own committee; ‘The Women’s Empowerment Committee ‘or ‘W.E.C.’ This is a committee which focuses on bringing awareness of misogyny towards women and educating the people in our school community on the importance of consent.
We would like to give a special thank you to Deirdre and Sonya for the effort they put in to make this workshop enjoyable for us. These two women are very inspiring artists and we as students learned a lot from them, and another thank you to Ms. Byrne for giving up her class time for the workshop. A big thank you to Ms. Zimmermann and Catherine Bowe (Art Centre director) for creating this opportunity 😊
School News in brief
The school hosted its first ever live webinar on Tuesday evening last to provide a wide range of information for its 150 incoming 1st year students and their parents/guardians. The meeting went very smoothly and finished with a very busy and lively question and answer session. Thanks and well done to all participants.
Well done to the five TY mini companies that have been selected to go forward to the next level of judging at county level – Sprace, Feed the World, Bujo Bullet Journal, Waxilicious, Dreamscape Dreamcatchers.
