Student decries ‘censorship’ of artwork project

AN art student has cried foul after teachers pulled part of her politically charged work about the role of bankers in the country’s economic doom and gloom.

The work was part of an exhibition opened last night by more than 100 students at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork, where Gráinne McHugh has done a one-year creative ceramics course. She put up her Orwellian work on Wednesday, depicting a scene in which bandana-wearing “piggy bank robbers” stand under a wall with the slogan “All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others” from George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, a satire on communist Russia, painted across a financial newspaper.

The scene features four smaller pigs to represent ordinary citizens but two banners she had put over them were removed by course director Stefanie Dinkelbach when she arrived at college yesterday. The red banners carried slogans from the 1968 social protests in France: “Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life” and “Run Comrades, the old world is behind us”.