RTÉ and the Creative Ireland Programme have teamed up to create a celebration of visual art with an exciting online art competition called This is Art!   The theme is This is Now and the competition invites young artists on the island of Ireland, aged 18 and under, individually or in groups, to create a piece of visual art that will be showcased in an online art gallery for generations to come. 

This is the entry of two of our Fifth Year students, Lydia and Ilona, and their work features on the competition Instagram account.  No winners have been announced but it's great to see the girls' work featuring on Instagram.

"In our piece we focus a young girl experiencing the global issues of her time through the lens of the media. We wanted to explore many different crucial problems that are currently shaping our history. Our generation is leading a revolution in tackling these issues. This inspired us to depict each topic through an artistic eye.
We include the Black Lives Matter movement, Hong Kong protests, Dublin homelessness crisis, Covid-19, pollution, child soldiers and the refugee crisis.

We created this piece using a mixed medium. These materials included, pencil, pens, colouring pencil, watercolour, chalk, felt pens, and digital drawing in photoshop. We wanted to use many different mediums because we felt that this mesh both our different artistic styles. This was our first time using photoshop as a medium. We experimented with new mediums and explored materials we were already familiar with. This allowed us to portray numerous images and topics in a rich and varied manner."

Lydia and Ilona