As we blogged about last month Young Model have been funded to carry out an exciting new digital project for The Niland Collection. Funded in part through the Arts Council Young Ensemble Scheme , the focus of this documentary project is to record the thoughts of the living Niland Collection artists.

The Summer session of Young Model (YM) will invite artists from The Niland Collection (The Sligo Municipal Art Collection which is housed and cared for by the Model) to be interviewed by Sligo’s young people.

This project will take place during the summer and involve YM travelling around Ireland to interview the Niland Collection artists. The group will upload their interviews as podcasts on to the newly developed Model web site due to be launched later this year. Their audio and visual podcasts will be available to download to an international audience and will be used extensively in the Model’s Education and outreach programme especially through our proposed new schools programme.

The group will blog about their experiences over the coming weeks, and if you want to keep track just follow the Category YM Niland Interviews

Erin writes: The first week of the Young Model interview project began this Tuesday. We started off by getting the YM members familiar with the recording equipment and becoming comfortable speaking in front of the camera by performing mock interviews. They were pretty impressive for mock interviews!

Wednesday was spent giving the YM members a brief history lesson on the artists who have responded so far. We thought it would be a good idea for the YM members to interview people in town, using a camera and Dictaphone so that they would feel more confident when interviewing the artists. These interviews were also very impressive and each member was confident in what they were doing. After the trip to town, the remainder of the afternoon was spent listening back on the footage.

Thursday we took a trip out to Glencar to take film some of the scenery. For the interviews we thought it would be nice to have footage of Sligo scenery in the background. Also we decided on what questions would be appropriate to ask the artists and we came up with a few wacky ones. A YM member, Yasmine made a phonecall to Nick Miller to find out when would be suitable for the interview. So the interview is scheduled for next Wednesday!