Artist – Michael Greenlaw
Summer Wildflowers
Skibbereen Day Care Centre
A beautiful fused glass project was created by the Monday and Thursday groups at Skibbereen Day Care Centre with visual artist Michael Greenlaw last year.
Inspired by summer wildflowers, the project began with Michael picking fresh flowers and bringing them into the day care centre one Monday morning. The groups started working with the flowers, painting backgrounds for the them to be placed on, and using acrylics to paint bluebells. Together they learned to mix paints to create different shades of green and blue.
Artistic explorations continued when participants each painted a 30cm x 30cm canvas board square. They applied flowers using various techniques including printing, stencilling, and collage. When assembled, the smaller squares combined to create a larger summer wildflower piece.
Flowers in Fused Glass
After a few weeks of experimenting, the group began to focus on creating a collaborative fused glass piece. Having created a pair of fused glass flowers before, they knew what to expect and were eager to give it another go! As a group, they decided what flowers would work best for the artworks. After discussion, they decided on a foxglove and a bluebell. When Michael brought a design featuring a foxglove to the day care centre, participants immediately began to share stories about collecting the flowers as children and how they were often called ‘fairy thimbles’.
Each participant worked on a 10cm x 10cm piece of glass, and then created their own ‘free-style’ border piece. The process involved sticking small pieces of coloured glass onto the bigger glass square. When fired in the kiln, the glue burned off and the glass fused together. When the pieces were finalised, the groups applied grey grout to the glass to give a ‘leaded’ appearance. Messy work but people enjoyed getting their hands dirty, and participants sang a few songs together as they waited for the pieces to dry.
Michael framed and backlit the pieces in his studio, and installed the two works in the day care centre in October 2024.
Timeframe
May to October 2024.
A huge thank you to the staff at Skibbereen Day Care Centre who encouraged and enabled participants to contribute to the work. This project was supported by Arts for Health Partnership Programme. Images by Michael Greenlaw.