Citizen Science and Art Project 2018

The John Sullivan Resource Centre, Irish Wheelchair Association Clane’s Citizen Science and Art Project was run from April 2018 up until September 2018, involving ALL members of the IWA Clane in the project. Members were involved in spending time in the biodiversity garden and recording the various species we found there especially wildflowers, bumblebees, and butterflies. The art class drew sketches of the wildflowers in the meadow and did studies of them in clay relief imprints, low relief handmade porcelain, and created paintings of the insects and birds that were observed there. The computer class helped with some of the recording of sightings to the Irish Biodiversity Data Centre.

The project has brought all the members together, including spending lots of quality time outdoors in the beautiful meadow and orchard of our biodiversity garden. We were blessed with the hottest summer on record and saw an incredible number of insects, bumblebees, butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and numerous insects we had never seen before. It has been a very rewarding project to be involved with and this exhibition is the fruition of that project.

Many thanks to Creative Ireland for funding this project, and Lucina Russell of KCC Arts Service and Bridget Loughlin, the Kildare County Heritage Officer for their continued support of our work at the JSC IWA Clane.