Creative Places Athy recently announced the recipients of a suite of new grant awards for artists and creative communities in Athy

Following an open call for a suite of grants in March, Creative Places Athy are delighted to announce the successful applicants and their proposed projects.

 

Sowing the Seeds of Socially Engaged Arts Award (€4,000)

Old Clonmullion Residents Association: Barbara Kelly & Old Clonmullion Residents Association; a newly formed residents’ group will create an intergenerational mural project in the locality. Together with artist Paul Woods they will engage in a process to create a piece of art that represents all the residents. The work will be representative of the people in the locality that will ignite a sense of pride in the area. 

 

Agnita Kenny with Heart of Athy is a collaboration between Athy Young At Heart an intercultural activity-based, group for older people, the Shackleton Museum, socially engaged artists and creative practitioners. Heart of Athy is a socially engaged art initiative encouraging reflection of personal connection with the town to express a vision for its future. The project draws on Athy Young At Heart members memories, family, and friends, as well as the Shackleton museums ballroom history to explore shared stories of place. Through creative workshops and informal chats stories will be captured through visual and creative mediums held at the Shackleton Museum to explore how these shared experiences inform and reform ideas of place to create an artwork. 

 

Cathy Callan: Raising awareness of the local environment, endangered species, and creative practice, between May and December 2022, Cathy will create activities, events and workshops for people in the local community to join her on a creative journey exploring themes of wonder, vulnerability, resilience and protection.

 

Embrace Music plan to provide introductory training in the field of Music and Healthcare for up to 8 musicians from Athy and the surrounding areas. The training will offer participants an insight into both the skills and considerations necessary to work as a musician in a healthcare context, with a special focus on geriatric care. The purpose of this programme is to widen the reach of Arts and Health projects within Co Kildare by fostering relationships between trained musicians and healthcare settings such as St Vincent's Hospital, Athy.

 

John McKenna Writer, Stories From A Small Town - will develop a new piece of theatre for stage, drawn from autobiographical and gathered stories of the lives of people living in Castledermot and Athy over a fifty-year period. The project will establish several story-telling sessions in the towns to hear from local people; to record their stories and to develop some of these stories for inclusion in the theatre piece. The storytelling sessions will take place in local venues such as Athy Arts Centre and Castledermot Community Centre.

 

KARE Services will work with artist Emily Rainsford in a series of facilitated workshops on the theme of "home". This theme will showcase the ideas and interpretations of our diverse group to highlight our community, our history, and our home, in a socially engaged and inclusive way. The group will explore different aspects of mixed media, including, collage, paint and clay, upcycled and recycled materials in making art. The project will also incorporate the exploration of local environments and biodiversity in the area. The projects aim is to support the group to re-engage with the community of Athy and form new, natural relationships through the medium of art (especially after lockdown). KARE will collaborate with the library services in delivery and showcase of the final work.

 

 

Emerging Artist/Creative Practitioner Award €500)

Artist Thomas Clare will continue to develop his practice and the use of this award will help fund a music video shoot in the summer of 2022 to accompany his song, Midnight Express. The song is about drug addiction and the video will tell a story of drug addiction and recovery. We will use local actors and Baselife as the production team of choice.

 

Kevin O'Boyle will develop his new writing style, creating Fantastical stories grounded in real history. He is currently working on his first novel, combining fantasies and westerns together into a new genre called 'Frontier Fantasy'. This novel is part of a long-term project to create new kinds of stories that are hybrids of history and mythology, a method of creating new folklore that can integrate all the messiness and ugliness of a nation's past, or a people's past, with the high ideals of their mythos.

 

 

 

 

 

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