Met David Harding, OBE, my former Head of Environmental Art Department at Glasgow School of Art this week while going around the Degree show.
He is involved in an innovative drawing project aimed at giving intensive tuition to 16 year olds who may not have the necessary academic qualifications to get into art college but show distinct promise.
Check it out:
Such a lot has happened in the past few weeks that I have not had time to update this blog.Went to the Hay Book Festival, sold some books through the Welsh Book Council stand and made lots of useful contacts.
To the consternation of all of us with Iphones at Hay we discovered we were in a black hole and internet access , which in the past, had been readily available on site this year was almost non-existent.
Today recovering from having opened my garden to the public under Scotland’s Garden Scheme, along with three others in Bridge of Allan.
We had 255 visitors and made more than £1,500 for charity. I was asked if my garden was influenced by the work of Hamilton Finlay’s “Little Sparta” and of course the text art and some of the sculptures certainly are.
Many people commented on the fact that the sculptures were an integral part of the garden and had not been “parachuted” in.
Some people who had visited the garden two years ago came back with friends looking for the sound installation “Duet”, birds singing and cat purring.
This made me realise that audio sculpture little understood and rarely heard, is under-estimated in its potential power to get through to people.
Ann Shaw is an artist/writer based in Scotland working in new media. As a journalist she campaigned and wrote about many social and medical issues. She is a feminist and founder member of Falkirk Womens Aid, active in the trades union movement and former member of National Union of Journalists Equality Working Party, and founder member of Forth Valley Open Studios.
