Ronan McCrea

A design for schoolyard and series of colour photographs.
School Play was the outcome of a public art commission associated with the construction of a new school building for a state primary school, catering for children from ages 4 – 12. The funding for the commission comes directly from central government as part of a “per cent for art” scheme for publicly funded infrastructure projects.

School Play consists of two main elements. A permanent design for a school play yard consisting of a series of painted circles and arcs on the tarmac and a series of thirty colour photographs.

Images: click on thumbnails to enlarge

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Images of photographs installed in school building:

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Video interview on the project made by “Publicart.ie”: “http://www.publicart.ie/

Description of the Project
The school is an “Educate Together” School, which is a model of school governance, developed as an alternate to religious governed schools and is based on a child-centred, multi–denominational, co-educational and democratically run ethos. The school has a relatively high proportion of what are termed ‘New Irish’, children of recent migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia and the school is very proud of its multicultural character.

The design for the yard consists of a series of circles and arcs painted in various colours onto the tarmac and also adjacent footpaths and car park. This graphic element on the schoolyard has a dual function: primarily to be used by the children in their self-directed playtime activities and to create a set or stage for the creation of a series of photographs.

Following a period of research into the play activities of the children particular attention was focused on those times of self directed and self organised play, which range from elaborate group games to individual daydreaming. These games are highly regulated by the children themselves, in that a lot of effort is invested into establishing the parameters and procedures for each activity, but these regulations creatively and rapidly shift, dissolve and coalesce from moment to moment. In this sense the circles are utilitarian – acting as boundaries and markings for un-prescribed play.

Imaginatively some of the circles extend far beyond the edge of the yard. What is visible in the yard is a small arc, which, if it were to be completed into a full circle, would reach far beyond the school gates and encompass surrounding hinterlands. While this is a somewhat subliminal aspect to the design, it also links with an image from Joyce’s Bildungsroman: ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’

“Stephen turned to the flyleaf of the geography book and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe”

[…] Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything after the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin, thin line there all around everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.”

Study for School Play:

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The second element of the School Play is a series of photographs, which were all shot from an elevated position looking down onto the yard during break time. From over 400 negatives, a final set of 30 images was selected for the series. Twelve of the photographs are printed to 112 × 90 cm size, framed and hung in the corridors and common areas of the school.

The circular markings become a set – in the sense of a stage set, or a film set – for everyday action. The circles and arcs mark out and bisect up the pictorial frame. Random actions become relational. The play becomes choreography. Miniature dramas and moments, both individual and collective become related through spatial arrangement. No directions are given from photographer to subject. Everything is random, like the Brownian motion of particles, or perhaps one of Canetti’s Crowds.

Working in a school, one becomes aware of a society in microcosm. The photographs recall Rodchencko’s street photography in the composition of angles and perspectives and something of his utopian notion of a new subjectivity revealed by new perspectives. They also acknowledge the historical methodologies of sequencing, series and typology from Muybridge, Neue Sachlichkeit, the Düsseldorf School to Conceptual art practices of 60s.

A typology is a type of knowledge. Play theorist Brian Sutton Smith in his book ‘The Ambiguity of Play’ focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct “rhetorics”-the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self. Sutton says these rhetorics “reveal more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility.” This reading of the rhetoric of play suggests it is an ideal subject for exploration of ideology and disciplinary boundaries.