What it’s all about

There are days when you have to ask yourself, ‘Why?’ With cuts and clinches coming from every angle of the industry and ‘the unknown’ hanging over most organisations; when the present is hard and the future is misty, if not downright bleak, why, we ask ourselves, did I not pay more attention in ICT? Why didn’t I just become a geography teacher? Surely I am in the wrong business.

And then a day comes along that makes it all worthwhile. You get to work remembering something about a school visit or a workshop taking place and, as the caffeine clears your mind and the ‘to do’s’ come into focus, you realise they’ll be here at 10:00 – half an hour’s time!

So out comes the battered education pack and carrying it through to the gallery space you make a mental note to avoid such parenthetical treatment of what really should be the core, driving force of any public arts institution and to make it more congruous with the rest of your organisation’s work (a ‘to do’ that has been carried forward for the last year or so, since your education officer fell victim to cuts).

You’ve barely set the materials up and got your thoughts on the talk-and-tour together when there they are, with the sunshine of youth, bobbing through the doors like a twenty-smiling-headed, red and grey caterpillar.

They are in awe. You only need to supply a little pressure to prise the corners of their minds, with a “What do you see? How does it make you feel?” and – like a tin of paint bursting open – they’re away! They don’t see ‘contemporary Finnish abstract expressionism’, they see: “Well, that’s the Earth, right, and then you get further and further away as these ones get smaller, and then you get sucked into this massive black hole here, right, and then you spin around in that crazy worm hole bit like the beginning of Doctor Who, right, and then you’re spat out on the other side in this totally different universe and these bits are all the crazy aliens and planets you can see around you.”

But, of course!

The kids were utterly enthralled. They knew nothing of the fight that every public arts institution has put up for them to still have access to this kind of education – the kind that can’t be assessed through tests or tick-boxes, whose output is the silent, subtler imprint of self expression, evaluation, confidence and creativity. They covered sheets, reams of sugar paper, sketch-pad paper, even the gallery floor with their buzzing inspiration. They had never seen art like it, “We didn’t think Art [capitalised, definitely] could be just shapes and colours;” “We thought it was all posh people and landscapes.” “This stuff makes me want to do it too…”

And isn’t that exactly the point?

I can’t tell this story to every member of Government who would like to see the arts squashed into a footnote on the budget sheet, but I tell it here in the hope that you, having read it, will remember why we do it, and what it’s really all about.