Celebrating a student art exhibition at Walsall Gallery
It was brilliant. I've just had a fantastic day! A get together with students from The University of Wolverhampton,Walsall Campus, their friends and family, writes education blogger Zoe Renilson of Walsall Art Gallery.
It was brilliant. I've just had a fantastic day! A get together with students from The University of Wolverhampton,Walsall Campus, their friends and family, writes education blogger Zoe Renilson of Walsall Art Gallery.
Exchange students from Belgium, Uni tutors and Kit Field the Dean of School. We were at The New Art Gallery in Walsall celebrating the student exhibition of art inspired by the Garman Ryan Collection at the gallery. Did you get chance to see it? I really liked the photo shopped images of Kitty, the quilted piece and the range of different materials, someone even did some stone carving. What impressed me most were the ideas and the effort that these students clearly put into learning art skills.
They're second year Bachelor of Education degree students. Pretty much all of these students haven't done any art since they were in year 9 at school, when they were 13-14 years old. Then they start their teaching degree in Wolverhampton when they're 18 or 19 years old and upwards. Here, their Art and Design tutor, Sue Fawson, and me, Zoe at the gallery, work together to bring the students to the gallery.
They're a great bunch of people. They generally start off by being a little apprehensive of both the gallery and contemporary art, and one of the exciting things about my job is that I get to open up their eyes and minds to the fun you can have in a gallery. I give them a tour of the gallery. We make it interactive and discursive and try out different things as we go around that you could do on a school trip like create a weather report of a landscape painting, and make a plastercine sculpture of one of Epstein's bronze heads on display. Then we explore the collection, put together by Kathleen Garman and Sally Ryan and family history archive behind all of this. Its this family history that inspires all their work for the exhibition.
Kathleen Garman, previously a local girl from Wednesbury, took off to London at 18 and became a model and mistress of Jacob Epstein. Three illegitimate children later, an alternative household, a shot in the shoulder from Epstein's wife, two deaths (a suicide and an unclear medical situation) and Kathleen finally agrees to marry Epstein. How could you not be intrigued?
It certainly captured the students' imagination. Back at the university Sue teaches them lots of art skills and really encourages them to think through the project and develop themselves, to research about the family further, explore new materials, try out new ideas. Some of this is working collaboratively in teams and sharing and discussing thoughts and approaches. A few weeks later they appear with final art pieces.
The gallery technical team hang the works professionally and Saturday 28th April was their preview day. The partnership between the gallery and the university has been growing over a large number of years, and this project and exhibition has grown out of the partnership. Every year we work with different students and the work still gets better and better. The ideas, the execution, the quality of presentation and how they write about their art for us, their viewers, to understand why they made those choices.
Not only that, the students are tour guides for their friends and family. As they flock into the gallery to show off their own work, they also use their teaching presentation skills to talk about the collection in the gallery. It really is education at its finest. The cascading of information, delivered with pure enthusiasm, confidence and ownership by these students who've become artists. These students are an inspiration to us with their freshness and desire to learn, and they are going to take this back into the classroom to pass onto our children in Walsall.
The journey these students have taken is mammoth. They have an experience of exhibiting art at a major gallery that they can share with every child they teach, and from this make their own teaching creative and inspiring, valuing the fabulous resources available locally, and the importance of giving everyone's work status and credit.
