Extracting what is most important

At a recent meeting between artists and teachers on The Nature of Sligo, one teacher spoke of the many small incidences that occur during each contact day when the artist is present in the school. He related the difficulty of adequately communicating the many decisions, conversations, experiments and responses that take place and indeed questioned the necessity to do so, when the very process of this engagement, the very fact that it was taking place was for him, the most important factor.

Ultimately I agree that it’s the aspiration itself toward open two-way communication and this endeavour through practical processes that are of most importance and value educationally, creatively and socially: the experience itself and the possibilities created through it, more so than what is actually made. Yet as artists working in this area, explaining what we do is a necessity - to participants, to our contemporaries and, most often, to funding institutes or organizations. Communicating our approach gives an understanding of the variety of practices that exist and helps us to negotiate the terms of a project or working relationship or leads us to find working environments which best suit our development.

In light these individual experiences, the parameters of working collaboratively with children and young people continue to be shift. Collaboration is a generous term. I think its relevance can be preserved if artists working with children and young people can constantly explore what it presents individually and honestly communicate their findings by choosing from the repertoire of words it presents, those which suit the individual nature of a particular project, at a particular time.

Image courtesy of Yvonne Cullivan: collection of drawings made by children in Scoil Naisiunta Bhride with Yvonne Cullivan on The Nature of Sligo Residency.