Tip of the hat to celebrate Gort’s new playground

A community arts group in Gort is creating willow and paper sculptures to help celebrate the opening of the town’s new playground next month.

 

The theme is the Mad Hatters Tea party and the sculptures are being made as fanciful, colourful and fun props for the celebration day on October 27.

Artist Shona MacGillivray is facilitating the art workshops as a colaboritive project, bringing together members of the community who may not usualy work together. Ms MacGillivray explains the background to this project.

“Because this is a community playground, we wanted to bring people together from different aspects of the community. It is great to get people together like this and what better way to do that than by being creative,” she says.

“I enjoy the St Patrick’s Day Communtiy Arts project so much that I thought it would be great to do that again,” she adds.

Last Saturday saw adults from the community  being creative along with members of Gort Youth Club, Brothers of Charity Service users, young people and children.

The next workshop takes place this Saturday from 1pm to 3pm, in the Orchard Centre, Brothers of Charity building, in Gort when local children will come to decorate the willow structures already made by the adults.

“We had 11 adults taking part last weekend and the room was full to capacity. Working with willow was a new experience for some of them and they really enjoyed it and many said they would like to come back to the children’s workshop but we will leave that to the children.

“This weekend’s workshop is already fully booked and we were really thrilled with the response. The children will decorate their work next week and I will put the finishing touches on them and then we will display them for the Mad Hatters tea party at the playground. The pieces are pretty weather proof, so that is important,” Ms MacGillivray adds.

“The reason for the use of willow is that it is very flexible and is a light material. Then we use a wet-strength paper with it as a skin over the top of it. That is the basic structure and then the children use coloured tissues and paints to decorate it,” she explains.

Shona’s background is in visual arts having worked with County Clare Arts office, and the Artists in School Scheme as well as Embrace, arts for people with Disabilities. For the past six years she has run The Art Box, visual arts for children and adults in Gort but her work in this project is voluntary.

“If we could get more sponsorship and funding for this sort of thing it would be really successful and we could do a lot more of it,” she believes.

The workshops are being run for free, facilitated by Ms MacGillivray MacGillivray from The Art Box, Gort, and supported by Quinns Pharmacy and The Orchard Centre, Gort.

The Gort Community Playground has its grand opening on Saturday, October 27, at  2pm with prizes for maddest hats, fun, games and treats.