Everything is in Everything (March - September 2017) is a collaborative commission with artists Clodagh Emoe, Jenny Brady and 4th year students at Hartstown Community School, in partnership with Fingal Arts Office.  

This project has seen artists Clodagh Emoe and Jenny Brady, work with the students over thirteen weeks to enquire into the many ways that objects, scriptwriting, imagery, choreographed movement, editing techniques, sound and performance can be used to suggest narrative; and to consider how experiences can be constructed for viewers of artworks.

The artistic outcome of this project is the vibrant and evocative moving-image artwork ‘The Butterfly Effect’, which considers causality and regret in modern life. This film was screened at The Irish Museum of Modern Art on the 24th April, 2018, in a special celebratory event for the students. 

The project developed over two stages - the first was characterised by focused artistic research and the second by artistic experimentation, production and a collaborative DIY ethic. With a consideration of the importance of encounter with actual artworks, included were research trips to IMMA and The RHA Gallery where the work of Dennis McNulty, Jac Leirner, Jane Locke and Richard Forrest was looked at and discussed. Scriptwriting workshop with writer Sue Rainsford introduced students to the role writing can take in contemporary visual art. 

The next phase of the project was experimental and action based. The students were encouraged to take ownership of the creative process, with the objective of allowing them to develop a sense of shared meaning and collective agency. Using the research as a springboard, Clodagh worked to facilitate the students to create their own collective narrative, experimenting with the techniques and materials explored in their research. As the project progressed, Jenny Brady became actively engaged in facilitating the shooting and editing of a moving-image artwork. Jenny Brady was also commissioned to make a film documenting the process of the project and students' responses - see below.

See project diary below for more detail. 

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VIDEO

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PROJECT DIARY

THE FINAL EDIT - WORKSHOP WITH JENNY BRADY AT IMMA
28th November

In Jenny Brady's editing workshop in IMMA's Studio 5, the students re-engaged with the video artwork they previously created with Clodagh. The purpose of Jenny's workshop was to facilitate the students to make editing decisions and to give direction to Jenny on how best to edit the final draft of this film. The video piece's existing script, text, sound and imagery were discussed in terms of themes...and the students workshopped to both refine the existing work and to insert found footage harvested from YouTube to communicate these themes further. Jenny will now do the final edit of this film and have it exhibition-ready for 2018....

#unsungartofediting #waltermurch #makingmeaning

RAIN AND THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
4th, 8th, 11th, 15th, 22nd May

Clodagh worked to fuse the different ideas together into a proposal for a collaborative piece of work, which she then presented to the students. She worked with them to structure it into the narrative of a moving-image piece with a series of scenes. They discussed props, desired effects for installation and actions. They assumed roles, rehearsed, planned. They worked together to conjure rain for a flood... They wore black and enacted their various scenes, shot by videographer Jenny Brady. 

#conjuring #scriptwriting #collectiveaction #fusingideas  

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IDEAS PITCH
27th April

Students re-visited the sites within the school that they had previously been given to propose an installation/intervention. Clodagh encouraged them to think about the work they had previously seen - the strange sculptures created by Richard Forrest - his use of video, audio, strange objects and mirrors to create an alternate reality; Jane Locke’s use of actual trees, a table and chairs and books as material for an artwork, her use of scale – her HUGE drawing. They then discussed their ideas collaboratively, prepared their 2D images and pitched to the class. 

#pitch #flood #colour #paperunderfoot #lightfilters #rubbish #flags #soundandspace

TRIP TO RHA GALLERY
3rd April

For their second field trip the students visited the annual emerging-artists exhibition Futures, at the RHA Gallery. Here the students and Clodagh looked closely at the installation and moving-image works of artists Jane Locke and Richard Forrest. Artist-facilitator Liliane Puthod led them in a discussion, partly using the Visual Thinking Strategies technique for engaging with the work.  

#otherworlds  #objectstellingstories #2d3d #recentpast  #ancientpast #acceleratinghistory 

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MAKING THE FAMILIAR UNFAMILIAR
23rd, 27th March

In the first of these two sessions Clodagh drew on material explored previously, to ask the question 'how can objects tell stories' and to consider how this could be related to making art installations. They looked at examples of work by artists such as Allan Kaprow, Kurt Schwitters, Ilya Kabakov and Olafur Elliason. They suggested the methods the artists may have employed at transforming space and suggesting narrative. Clodagh asked them to imagine how the audience would experience these works through all their senses. Following the discussion, students were each allocated a site within the school building. Their challenge was to imagine an installation and consider how and why they would transform their given space. Their first task was to photograph and print images of the space.  During the following week they discussed their ideas as groups and used drawing to transform the printed images, as though transforming the space. 

#storytelling #interpretation #immersiveart #visualmetaphors

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SCRIPTWRITING IN CONTEMPORARY ART WITH SUE RAINSFORD
16th March

In this workshop with invited guest writer Sue Rainsford she discussed her collaborations with artists Bridget O'Gorman and Alan James Burns and how she worked with them to reveal hidden or repressed narratives. She spoke of imagining the thoughts, feelings or perceptions of objects, as in her work with Bridget O'Gorman In the Flesh. She spoke about Entirely Hollow Aside from the Dark with Alan James Burns where she scripted the fragmented voice of an imagined character from a local psychiatric institution. This recording was experienced by the audience inside a cave on a beach at night. She also presented the work of Maria Fusco - Master Rock -  a work that partially involved imagining the voice of the granite of a mountain. All of these highly imaginative works were discussed before she asked the students to do an exercise - to write from the perspective of an object. What observations would an object make? What types of language would these objects use?  Ideas from students were abundant - pianos experiencing the emotional tones of the notes played on them, tired hairbrushes, put-upon roads and more. 

#artwriting #imaginingotherperspectives #makingvisible #collaboration

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TRIP TO THE IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
9th March

During a trip to IMMA Clodagh and the students viewed the work of artist Jac Leirner and the piece I reached inside myself through time by Dennis McNulty. In these works, the use of everyday materials - baggage labels, rulers, building materials, coloured gels - opened up a world of artistic possibilities for the visiting students. 

#thestuffofeveryday  #trivialnottrivial #soundinart

I'm not the teacher and you're not the students.
The equality of intelligences is the starting point of The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 
This is the starting point of this project.

Emancipation. Site-specific. Collaboration. Staging. Intervention. Viewer.

Where do we see art? 
Does art involve senses other than sight?
What interests you? 

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