Mark O’Brien in conversation with Orla Kelly

Orla Kelly is a visual artist and creative educationalist. Her own education includes a diploma in psychology, a degree in fine art and a masters in arts management. She has worked with children for over a decade creating work in Dublin, and mainland Europe, with and without a common spoken tongue, using creative understanding to collaboratively make things. Her work with children aims to explore a naturally intelligent and free imagination, where real creation is almost always an intelligent action, done with concentration and joy to understand the world and to affect our relationship with it.

CLICK HERE to listen to the interview.

Post interview, Mark also asked Orla the following question:
What resources does an artist need, intellectually and artistically?

Conversations are incredibly important, even semi-formal ones like our recorded conversation. Many artists and facilitators evaluate in their own creative head space and respond to evaluation through form filling. Conversations are incredibly important to help discover the reality of the inner monologue and really aid the digestion of a creative interaction. Not only this, they can aid the evolution of practice for the artist and expand the meaning of the engagement for the engager.

Unfortunately, many who engage artists are more concerned with the form that is filled to demonstrate effectiveness to the funder, than endeavouring to find out the significance of one step to the next step for the parties involved. Time is often a factor that impedes conversations but reviews should be inbuilt - peer to peer, open and honest.

To aid development, links need to be made with latest research, with inspired practice, with dreams and with reality, intellect and heart by artist and engager. ‘What if’ should always be used and with the greatest enthusiasm.

We are not so different from children. We learn by trying and either succeeding or failing, but we need to consciously link all the elements to what are we trying to do essentially. This is important for the development of the artist educator, or whoever we are, and for the authentic engagement. The artist should understand the real value of the steps of the process and if the steps taken by the engager are not appropriate the artist should be able to suggest appropriate ones. As artists we need to be braver to push our role in creative education and bolder to evolve it.

Highlights from Orla’s interview:

Dig It was an early Primary School art in schools project, so I was the artist in one of the schools in Ballymun and there was a real interesting conversation - I’m not sure if it was a conversation or whether it was many that we had over product versus process and I really started to think about these two things - they have value each on their own and they don’t have to be the same thing and - what’s better, what’s worse? And teachers in evaluation from that project, and from other projects previous to that. They had spoken of, (maybe not spoken of), but intimated that they wanted a product as an outcome of an artist engaging with the children and I thought that was very interesting that what do you expect as a teacher as a product? Do you expect your children to be more engaged, more enlived, better people, better children or do you want them to bring home an object that they made with an artist in a school. And fair enough it’s not so easy to evaluate a process but there’s value in trying to evaluate a process and even in understanding that there’s huge value in process. And I think the conversation now has moved on with many teachers - not all - but that there is a certain understanding that it’s not the product, the outcome is not the be all and end all of any engagement

Would you think that there’s a thread both in your own practice and in your collaborative engagement or participative work - Is there a thread that you recognise in your aesthetic and the way you approach things?

I think it’s different with every engagement. I suppose what would be my intention with every engagement is to be authentic either in my own work or in work with other people - children or adults or...

I’m interested in that word "authentic" if you wouldn’t mind talking about that a bit more, and what that means?

For me, to be authentic is to be not only the real deal for yourself but to engage with the other, to really try for somehting that is undescribable at the point where you start from. Maybe it’s definable in some sense, that an artist comes together with a teacher who has an idea to engage with their students or young people, and you work through a relationship with children or adults or whoever those people who are engaging with you are. And you come out at the end of it, if you maintain that honest, open, authentic relationship, or even a proper relationship, you end up with something authentic at the end of it because you’ve engaged authentically.

So the starting point is important?

And not only the starting point, but that you continue in the same vein.

You’ve spoken a lot about the educational context and obviously your own work spans a lot of different contexts, but can I ask you about the challenges of working in this way. Because I think we all know what the process can bring, but there are certain challenges and it’d be interesting to see what has come up for you in the past, the challenges of working with and for young people or in different contexts.

In some ways one of the challenges goes back to the concept of the product and process, that in a real engagement with an artist -that as an artist you try not dilute what you do, or you try not dilute the engagement and sometimes it does get diluted, either because those who are paying or who are bringing the artist in have an agenda and it’s not the same agenda as the artist’s. If we’re talking about being an authentic artist, sometimes those who make the engagement...

If there’s a theme or a way of working already given in to the project, is there confinement around that?

Not necessarily confinement, but that it’s diluted because the goals are not the same. That idea of trivialising what an artist does in trying to get an audience and in that case you do dilute what the artist does, because it’s easier to make what the artist does seem easy, that "you too can do it, you too can be an artist, you too can make wonderful things..." and of course yes, you can, but there’s a middle ground between completely trivialising and popularising art work with children or adults and the other side of making it authentic again.

Do you want to talk a bit about what inspires you in the area of Early Years or what it is that you’re trying to find out for yourself?

There seems to be a huge gap in provision for early years education - creative education - not only for the children but in the artists community as well. There’s very few people working in the zero to four years of age, specifically in arts education and I think there’s a great wealth to be had for both children and artists and educationalists - not just a gap or a wealth but there’s a need to educate when children are most creative, not to shape them out of proportion but to understand what they can share with an artist.

A lot of my conversations have been about engagement, not versus aesthetic, but how do you find a space between the two of them? But from watching you talk and hearing what you’re saying is that the aesthetic is in the room with that age group [Early Years]. Do you know what I mean? I’m interested in going back to the early part of the conversation around the outputs or the outcomes of the work, so, I mean place that question now in this early years context.. How do you broker that conversation with early years workers? Are the perceived outcomes completely different, or...?

I don’t know the answer but I really do want to find out and I think there’s something really important there to be learned. As a grown up artist, how do you... what is an early years aesthetic? Does aesthetic come into play? Is that word useful in that setting? And what does it really mean even in a grown-up setting and how do they all fit together and all of these words that are used, we kind of use them... like creativity, aesthetic, even experience... are we using them with the right understanding? And I suppose it comes back to the idea of being authentic. That if we really investigate, if we are really interested in being artists in the true sense, we should really investigate these words and what they really mean, or could possibly mean for ourselves.