Play the Record

TULCA Contemporary Visual Art Festival, Galway invited Mobile Art School to create a workshop event for selected schools in Ballinasloe Library. The result was a collaboration between the artists Stephen Brandes and Russell Hart who, using vinyl records bought in charity shops as the base materials, devised a set of two workshops to be experienced in sequence. The resulting workshops involved the two participating 5th classes each doing a one-hour workshop with each artist. On the day of the event all children were given a second-hand vinyl record with sleeve at the outset.

In partnership with TULCA, Galway County Libraries and Ballinasloe Library.

Russell Hart: Interpretation of music as an image

Russell worked with the children to consider sound visually. Through his workshop they dicussed improvisation, synesthesia and exploring and creating a graphic score/notation as an alternative to standard written music. They worked directly on to the surface of vinyl records which Russell had previously painted white. The children drew in response to musical compositions by Aphex Twin and Miles Davis. He invited them to listen closely while drawing and consider the concept of music as a colour or a series of colours. There was a strong aesthetic and poetic quality to working with sound and colour in this way and the children responded becoming quietly engaged in drawing whilst listening.

Stephen Brandes: Humour and Pictorial Language in Art

In Stephen’s workshop the children looked at examples of work by artists such as John Stezaker, Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and Peter Blake. He introduced collage as an artform with a history linked to the invention of photography and how it came to be used as political satire. They looked at how album covers communicate visually with a special emphasis on collage. Stephen encouraged the children to engage with humour and the absurd in the creation of their own collages. The resulting works were energetic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.