Unravelling Shetland

FIRST WORKSHOP APRIL 26^th

All the school and community workshops programmed for the next few weeks are “family” workshops, therefore parents and relatives have been invited to attend with their children.

The first workshop was with the peerie class (peerie is Shetland dialect for “small” or Scots “wee” and ubiquitously used). This was slightly challenging, because I had the whole class – admittedly only 13 pupils, but more than double the number I would happily work with for a mosaic workshop with this age group. The arrangement had been made before I arrived and so I decided to stick to it, and it went well, although of course the wee ones are too young to use the tile cutters and their attention span is fairly short, even though I had various activities to occupy them with. Several parents came along, so there was at least one adult on every table, and the adults were kept very busy cutting tiles for the kids to stick in arrangements on to fibre-glass mesh. This mesh is a new discovery for me. For years I have been making mosaics using the reverse method by sticking the tiles face down on to brown paper, which is applied to the cement and then peeled off afterwards and grouted. The invention of this mesh means that it is possible to work face up, which is far preferable, and hence no hassle of removing the paper afterwards.

A main aspect of this project is the number and length of workshops, which was set in stone at the bidding stage as part of the funding requirements and therefore established before the artist was employed. Nine full day workshops are required, which, once I started working on my schedule, I quickly worked out would leave me with very little time to actually make the mosaics. Paid time, that is, for an undeniable fact is that in my line of work, it is very difficult indeed to stop oneself from working overtime, usually a lot! It is easy enough to prepare a timescale, but the reality is, once the creative process is under way, one would have to be extremely hard headed to decide to stop because the working day is over. This is definitely a factor relating to why most artists do not earn enough, even those, like myself, who are always working on paid commissions, to the extent that a usual working week is at least 6 days and too often up to 14/15-hour days. The monster needs to be fed (money) and given that for every day I get paid for, I work about 2 more unpaid looking for the next job, marketing, etc. It never stops. That’s the reality.

Anyway, the reason there is a problem with having so many days taken up running workshops for the kind of projects I do is an intrinsic irony within the marriage of public art and public involvement. Almost every public art project includes a key element of community consultation, which is, of course, essential for the resulting artwork to be owned by and a source of pride among the local community. There are many ways of involving people in this consultation process. The problem I am referring to is when I am required to involve people in the production of the final piece, because it means the quality of the artwork is compromised. Most of the commissions I work on have a specified life span of around thirty years, although life span aside, a professional piece of artwork is necessarily of a professional standard. The irony is that this involvement is a necessary and important aspect of the commissioning process, and yet it means the way this involvement needs to be carried out must be specifically suited to the medium employed and the artist’s working method and too often it has been designed with a “one-size fits all” attitude.

DIGGING POLYSTYRENE

Following the frustration about the polystyrene forms refusing to leave the fibre- glass moulds, I sought advice from various quarters about the best way to get them out. The most popular suggestion was to use petrol to dissolve it (not very green, but then neither is polystyrene. Roll on greener options.) But this was really not viable, given that I need the forms themselves to create the mosaics. Without them I would be working blind. So in the end I opted to dig out sections of the “poly pies”, rather like slices of a cake, enabling removal of the remaining pieces. Children were given this task, which was a source of much amusement and fun. Thank goodness! It was still a strenuous job in its entirety; just the kind of unforeseen problem that is most unwelcome, but the road to finding a solution is creative in itself.

LAMBING

It’s lambing season. Everyone is very preoccupied with the lambing, visiting their flocks four, five times a day to check all the new arrivals and assist any ewes in distress. I went back to Nesting, where I was staying last time, to visit my previous landlord & lady (the Bradleys) and their gulmoket and katmoket Shetland sheep – one is brown with a cream belly and the other is cream with a brown belly. Very cute indeed. I also visited Vaila, a teacher from the school, who is nursing a three-day old lamb. It was tiny and shivering hard in the cold un-spring-like May air. It turns out Vaila is the owner of all the Shetland ponies I photographed many a time when driving along to Gletness last time. Having never been to Shetland before, I have never been able to appreciate how perfectly adapted these miniature ponies are for this harsh, windswept, landscape.

BACK AGAIN

It’s great to be back. I have arrived to a riot of yellow everywhere. Daffodils carpet the countryside in the wildest, most beautifully rustic way, sprouting along every verge, uninhibited. I have settled in Voe in the old doctor’s house, one of the grandest houses overlooking Olna Firth. It was built to entice a doctor here and Martin, its current owner, informs me that he is only the second person ever to live there who is not a doctor. The old surgery has been converted into a chalet but is well remembered by all as a formerly important service in the North Mainland.

My daily journey to the school now takes five minutes walking through the most stunning scenery past the voe, the kirk and the shop.

Travelling chaos

I am a volcano victim! I cannot complain as much as many people, who may still be stranded in airports around the world, would be justified in doing, however I was unlucky in having my return flight to Shetland booked on the day the volcano erupted! After endlessly changing my flight day after day, after a week I took decisive action and booked the ferry. So I arrived 10 days late with several workshops postponed, but get here I did! Today was my first day back at the school and I spent the whole day preparing the mosaic tiles. The entire room is now covered in sheets of gorgeously bright, aesthetically pleasing tiny squares of colour.

I commissioned a fellow artist maker in Brighton, Jeffrey Hardy, to make the resin moulds for the toadstool “tops”; works of art in themselves! One good thing about driving up was the eradication of the need to send them up by courier, which would have involved making special timber boxes – they are fairly large! Once we have contracted a builder the bases will be cast in concrete directly into the ground and the tops, also in concrete, will be secured on top.

One pretty major hiccup – the polystyrene forms will not come out of the moulds! A paranoia of mine which this time is totally justified. Jeffrey was trying to be too clever by using latex as a barrier but it had the opposite effect. A cheap splash of fairy liquid would have done the trick. So now I have to fit into my ridiculously tight schedule hours of chipping the polystyrene out. Ouch!