Firemen to the Rescue

zoom

Our work is in response to our trip to the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life in Castlebar.  Our brief “Beyond the Surface” led us to look at the way women worked together historically particularly in groups called a “Meitheal”.

We have found through our experience of this project that by sharing materials, ideas and support that we were collaborating on a daily basis and had actually formed our own Meitheal.  Because of this we decided we wanted to submit a collaborative work to the exhibition. 

We wanted to present our work in more that one format to illustrate our learning across the disciplines of Photography, Digital Media as well as our knowledge gained from Learning to Learn and Core Visual Studies.  We started by deciding where to take our inspiration from and after some debate decided to settle on weaving.  We felt that it was something that all four of us could equally participate in, we also decided to use only found materials. 

Whilst discussing possible materials we hear noise on the roof of the studio, on investigation we found that the Fire Brigade were on a training exercise and we got talking to them.  With a bit of humour we managed to persuade them to give us an old 75ft long fire hose.

We decided to weave a harvest knot as this was traditionally done at the end of the harvest and hung over the festival banquet table by the women.  Our large scale harvest knot will be exhibited to celebrate our new skills, new friends and the end of the first semester in what is shaping up to be a fabulous and enjoyable experience.

Our installation comprises of both a sculptural piece and also a video installation.