My Eye View

My Journey as a student in a Visual Arts Class and what our group have achieved. And of course no Journey is complete without a guide. Our sincere thanks to our teacher Siobhan Dempsey, without whose guidance, help and patience this would not have been possible.

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Wild life along the Wild Atlantic Way

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Snow capped Mt. Brandon. View from Cam on the Wild Atlantic Way

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Stormy seas at Coumeenole beach along the Wild Atlantic Way

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Skellig Art Fair

The next exhibition on our agenda was the Skellig Hotel Christmas Craft Fair, a promotional fair for locally produced products.

This turned out to be a very educational exhibition inthat it showed us what we needed to consider for future exhibitions.

I was a bit disappointed in the space we were allocated in the Skellig. Besides being surrounded by other photographers, (in fairness to the Skellig they did move some of these to other areas,) our table ran alongside the windows overlooking the harbour which was lovely on the day, but because we had no display units, and no wall behind us, it meant we had no place to hang our photos so we had to leave most of our photos in boxes on the table.  We did enjoy the day though, meeting and talking to other people who also had stands and consider this all part of the learning process.  

 What we need to consider for future Exhibitions

Poster ---- Who we are.

Display units for photos, or make sure there is a wall or place to hang photos for display.

Local area photos. Viewers at fair spent more time looking at photos of local areas ie. places they themselves recognized.

Have one or two photographs in frames, which add a bit of professionalism to exhibition.

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LISTOWEL FOOD FAIR

Ann Sheehan travelled to Listowel and met the Food Fair chairman Pearse Walsh, who was delighted to include our exhibition in their programme.Ann even succeeded in having it included in their printed programme as an event. A vacant shop premises was offered but could not be viewed until the morning of the 1st day of the festival, so we just had to run with that and hope for the best. A rota was arranged to cover the setting up on the Thurs and to cover the weekend. Myself, Ann & Bosco spent 3-4 hrs cleaning & organising the premises and then arranging & hanging the Posters. I covered the Friday morning which was very quiet, with Ann covering the afternoon.Reasonable response & public unterest over the weekend.Again, very worthwhile experience- We are learning all the time!!.

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Listowel Food Fair exhibition

Thanks to Noel O’Neill  for above photos and summary of Féasta’s exhibition in Listowel which unfortunately I was unable to attend. Thanks to all in our group for all the hard work in preparing and organizing this exhibition.

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Post Production

Review of Dingle Feile Bia exhibition

Our exhibition went really well, we were all very happy with our posters as were the shop owners.

Reviewing results of our exhibition these are the points to remember when entering another exhibition.

1.       Check out theme of exhibition

2.       Take photos to fit in with theme.

3.       Choose photos that will compliment both theme and photos.

4.       If printed as posters, try to exhibit in a shady area (if possible) as sun damages the colour on posters.

5.       If hanging in shop windows talk to shop owners before hanging as to their preference on where and which windows they would like pictures hung.

6.       Get feedback from shop owners as well as exhibition organizers.

7.       Thank shop owners for letting you use their premises.

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Production (cont.)

More pictures from hanging the posters 

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Production

1.     Setting up Rotas. We set up groups of three, Bosco, Áine and myself were in one group. 

2.     Transporting posters to location of exhibition. Bosco brought his and my posters to shops for hanging.

3.    Hanging the Posters. We were very lucky in that the day was dry, but it was very sunny which made the windows look like mirrors.

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Pre Production

1.       Get permission from Dingle Food Festival to exhibit photos at their festival. Which was given and we were made very welcome to participate

2.       Choosing 3 pictures each to fit theme of the Festival, theme being food.

3.       Decide what size pictures were to be printed at. We decided on A1 posters with a hardback to keep them hanging straight.

4.       Contact printers and get the best deal for group printing. Killarney printing gave us the best deal at the time, plus they put two small holes in corners of posters for hanging line, which was a great help.

5.       Talkto shop owners for permission to hang posters in their shop windows. Which we got.

6.       Organizing help in hanging posters. We arranged that we would split class into groups of 3.

7.       Check what tools were needed to hang posters. Most of us were fortunate enough in that there were already hooks in the shop windows, so all we needed was to have some tacks, cellotape and hanging line. We used fishing line for hanging the posters which worked out very well as it was quite invisible.

8.       Organize collection of posters from Printers. Máire Uí Léime very kindly collected these for us in Killarney.  The posters looked very good, I think everyone was quite pleased with the results.

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Following a short summer break it was back to class again in September and with less than a month to go before the Dingle Food Festival we had a lot of planning to do.

 To keep focused and get organized we planned out a:

1.      Pre Production,

2.      Production and

3.      Post Production schedule.

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Farmers Market

At the Farmers Market we could display or sell any of our photographs. We all sold a few and were happy enough to have taken part, especially as it gave us some idea as to what we needed, and what we needed to do to prepare ourselves for the exhibition during the Dingle Food Festival in October.

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Following visiting the exhibition in Limerick our next class session was to determine what we wanted to do with our photographs. So we decided to form a photography group which we called Féasta, and exhibit some of our photos at the following:

(1)  The farmers market.

(2)   The Féile Bia (Food Festival) being held in Dingle from the 3rd to the 5th of Oct. 

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Living along the Wild Atlantic Way there is no end to the beauty all around us. So in between classes I take off with camera to get some shots, and of course some camera practice as well.  As part of the class we had to set up a Flickr Account, you can view some more of my pictures on Flickr

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I enjoyed the photos and videos at the Eva Biennial Visual Art Exhibition in Limerick, so much so, I would like to visit this gallery again and hopefully this year will be able to do so, along with a few others I didn’t get to see in 2014.

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A few pictures taken along the Wild Atlantic Way  enroute to the Eva Exhibition and Liimerick City of culture. 

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We began with a “Brainstorming” session and decided we would like to have some of our photographs shown at different exhibitions. Knowing very little on how to go about this we decided to visit some galleries and check out how other photographers had their work displayed. Our first visit was to the Eva Biennial Visual Art Exhibition in Limerick.

Comments and / or suggestions welcome and appreciated.