CLUNY SECONDARY SCHOOL, IDEA GENERATION WORKSHOP

Our visit to Cluny Secondary School, Killiney was a few months in the making and our first project of 2022. After a very lovely rest over the Christmas period we were excited to get stuck back into the magical chaos of creating murals.

Each project we run with a school is always unique to that school and their needs. For Cluny, we agreed with their Art Teacher that one workshop and two mural painting days alongside the TY girls would work for what we hoped to achieve.

At the beginning of the week we arrived bright and early to the schools beautiful library area where we met the TY year for a workshop to build and develop ideas for their music room.

We began the workshop with a short mindfulness activity to help the girls settle into the space. We need not explain the benefits of mindfulness – as it’s universally regarded at this stage, but we find it particularly helpful for people to touch base with themselves before jumping into the main activities.

This workshop was slightly different because we were assigned the task of transforming the music room, so we already knew that there would have to be a lot of music – related features spread throughout the mural. With this in mind, we guided the girls to use any inspiration they could muster from their favourite artists, lyrics, instruments or anything that came to mind for them.

We typically structure our workshops around the development of theme, text, colour palettes, imagery, general design and message that the mural conveys. We got the ladies to work in groups to discuss these aspects, what they like/ don’t like and then to use the mediums we provided to bring their ideas to life.

By the end of the workshop we had plenty of fantastic and energetic ideas that we could bring home with us to review. We had two days to take a deeper dive into everyone’s ideas before getting stuck into painting them into existence. You can read about the creation of the mural here.