Treorchy Comprehensive School
This project was a collaboration between Year 10 Btec Art students at Treorchy Comprehensive, Maureen O’Kane, artist in residence at Ysbyty George Thomas and Louise Shenstone, Public Art Co-ordinator for Rhondda Cynon Taff Community Arts.
The group decided to create a pair of public artworks for sites at the School and at Ysbyty George Thomas, a local hospital for elderly people with mental health problems. The theme of the project was ‘reminiscence’, which encouraged the group to look at personal histories and to determine the best way to record and present information about themselves and their families. Working with objects to represent older family members, the students used a number of casting techniques to produce low relief plaster casts.
Research for the project was enhanced by group trips to St Fagans: National History Museum, where the young people took part in casting workshops with Carlos Pinatti, and the National Museum Cardiff, where the group looked at the collections and discussed with archaeologist Ken Brassil, the different ways of interpreting the past which gave the students further ideas about preserving and displaying memories.
