Galway Arts Centre has been working with older people in nursing homes and day units around Galway city to help them with their creative expression in the Burning Bright programme.
Burning Bright is an artistic programme for older people run by Galway Arts Centre which is part of the Bealtaine Festival, the national arts festival celebrating creativity as we age.
Established 14 years ago, the project encourages participants to celebrate and engage in their own creativity, and Burning Bright brings together work from three projects that have been running this year.
Facilitated by professional artists working in nursing units, day centres and hospitals across Galway City, this visual arts project enhances opportunity for self-expression.
In The Charms of Mervue artist Louise Manifold has been working with people at Sonas Day Centre Mervue to create art based on the value of old objects and heirlooms belonging to participants.
They have been working to create a small living museum of the first residents of the Mervue estates back in the 1950s.
As part of this project the people creating art have worked with an antique collector on the historical and product value of individual items as well as looking at the personal, sentimental value that makes them so important.
Over at the St. Francis Day Care Centre Amantine Dahan has been helping a group working in a context of geometries that reminds the of happy times, other context and histories in Happy Geometry.
Commonly looking at shapes and how they take us to other places in time, Amantine explored the sentimental value even a simple shape can take on.
Over at Croà na Gaillimhe artist Cliona Ryan has been working with a group of people on Hospitality, looking at the hospitality that naturally occurs in nature.
Their work combines the frailty of paper flowers offset against the strength found in growths of wood.
These patches that have been incorporated in the paper hearts are a contemporary twist on traditional crafting methods and again reinforce the healing aspect of human nature.
It is housed in Croi na Gaillimhe with the influence being on how people, both volunteers and attendees alike, pull together to offer warmth and hospitality to all who are housed within the walls of the building and the surrounds.
Burning Bright is being launched at Galway Arts Centre on Monday, May 13 at 2pm and will run until May 25.
photo: Aoife Frehan
