Social Engagement Through Urban Landscape Painting
The following short course was designed and piloted according to the recent curricular and policy changes of the Visual Art Junior Cycle curriculum. These students engaged with a variety of visual media representations of Limerick City – investigating their implicit and explicit messages. Through visual analysis of their denotations and connotations, it was discovered that these images perpetuated a negative, stereotypical view of the local community. Students identified a disconnection between their personal experiences of the locality and the distant, detached perspective of the mass media. Exploring the notion of truthful and authentic representation, students utilised photography as an initial means of capturing their lived and textured experiences, which informed their painting compositions.
Project AIms
‘Social Engagement Through Landscape Painting’ aimed to develop students’ engagement with social issues, as they exist in their local community. Through liberating art practices, this course sought to improve participants’ sense of social awareness, presently and in the future. The course also sought to develop students’ skill and confidence in urban landscape painting, and extend their perceptions of the process as a viable method of social critique.
Young people participating in Junior Cycle education are at a pivotal stage of their lives, when how they deal with issues in their everyday, social lives could have implications for the remainder of their teenage years. These issues are not only present in the school environment, but also outside its walls – in the local community. It is important that participants learn how to address real, confronting issues, in a healthy way that improves co-existence within both the school and wider local community.
In a media saturated age, where young audiences are bombarded with images, the media plays a vital role in communicating highly-mediated content. Media representations provide both implicit and explicit messages that influence young people’s experiences, perceptions, and understandings of the world around them. Following a specific agenda, media representations risk being misleading or inaccurate. Therefore, it was the aim of this course to provide students with the skills to interrogate and critically analyse these visual messages, in order to anticipate, respond to, counter, and challenge their influence.
Sample of Students' Work
Painting acted as a catalyst for the elevation and extension of students’ ordinary, mundane experiences in the community; culminating in a confrontation of the stereotypical representations of the media. Through experimentation with a wide range of implements and application techniques, students sought to represent their experiences of a place. This resulted in the dissemination of positive, emotionally- charged artworks. Through local exhibition, the paintings established a critical social discourse within the local community. Students also participated in a local radio station interview as young, active citizens; regarding the stereotypical media representations of their place.
Click to listen to radio interview
