FIRST WORKSHOP APRIL 26th
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.
