In late September we invited some online bloggers to speak with Paul Butler and Mark Garry of the Reverse Pedagogy residency. Simon Fleming, Canadian Visual artist and occasional art writer based in Galway, wrote this short piece about his conversation with Butler.
If you would like to get involved writing online about The Model future projects please get in touch with Denise who would love to hear from you.
Our ex-Development Manager (now Music and Events Manager) Aoife Flynn was invited to present a case study at the recent National Gallery of Ireland Symposium on Audience Development. The case study was around the Model Blog, how we came to set it up, whether it’s been a success and some tips for others thinking about setting up an arts blog.
The motivation for this blog was to create a virtual front desk for The Model during our temporary closure; somewhere online where people could drop by and pick up information beyond that contained in the programme of events. We wanted it to be relatively informal, conversational and informative, much like how we want our Front Desk in the physical building to function. We’ve been running the blog for over 18months now and have reached a monthly readership of 2,400+ , which has increased traffic to our main website by 33% over the same period.
For us it’s been a great success, we feel we have a platform to add extra information to enhance the exhibition experience- as with the case of Barbad Golshiri’s mails sent from Tehran during the recent political unrest while Medium Religion was ongoing – and somewhere to fill you in on works in progress like the redevelopment, The Interview project, The Niland Collection, The Trades Club and more. It’s also a place where people can post replies and give us your reactions to articles or updates, and we’d love to hear more of that.
It’s also been a great way for us to test other social platforms like flickr, facebook, twitter and youtube and we look forward to integrating all of these elements into our new web platform which we’ll launch along with the new building in spring next year
For anyone at the symposium that wants the notes from the case study, which include some further reading around current theories on the use of web 2.0 for the museum/gallery you can download them below, and you can view the slide show here
Click to Download: Case Study on The Model Blog for NGI Symposium
First day of the school's Collage Parties at Reverse Pedagogy
From mid-October to mid November, The Model will be working with local primary and secondary schools from Sligo alongside our current exhibition Reverse Pedagogy. Below we hear from two people involved in the project so far, Artist Andy Parsons and teacher Anne-Marie Watters.
Artist Andy Parsons;
‘The Reverse Pedagogy Schools Programme takes two of the key themes of the the show as its starting points; collaborative working and play as art. The young people visiting the gallery have been given a short tour and a chance to visit the Fairy disco, then asked to throw a giant cardboard dice to move along a collage board game spanning three of the gallery’s downstairs rooms.
The collage party then begins with a race against time to fill in the area of floor space space they have landed on in an hour. The project aims to create the same sense of anarchic fun as the exhibition while introducing young people to art that challenges a great number of conventions.’
Facilitator Anne Marie Watters spoke about the experience for the children;
‘The children really had a good time in the workshops, the different age groups and schools made it more interesting.
The whole Fairy room in the gallery seemed to connect better with the primary school children and their teachers also.
They were more open to suggestion, and the newspaper and magazine collages seemed to work better than just sticking to colored pieces of paper and material. It meant they had to think more about what images to use, where to position them and how to incorporate it into the whole picture.
By making it into a game so the children really got involved in it was a brilliant idea. You determined where you were by throwing the dice and the used that as you space to use in what ever way you wanted. Be it by using the whole space, using parts of it or not much at all. It was good to see how they worked together whether in pairs or in groups. I really had fun in the collage party, and the artist Andy Parsons is great to work with too. He brings all his sense of adventure and enthusiasm into the workshops.’
Reverse Pedagogy runs until November 22nd at The Model Satellite, Castle Street, Sligo.
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