Partners in Creation

ALISTAIR PEEBLES investigates an ambitious visual arts residency project in Kirkwall.

AT PAPDALE Primary School, Kirkwall, a new wave has begun to take shape in the world of education and the visual arts in Orkney. The Stromness-based collaborative, Christil Trumpet, has recently taken up residence in the school and over the next twelve months artists Christopher Prendergast and Matilda Tumim will be working there with pupils, staff and the local community in the first residency of its kind in the county.

Co-funded by the Scottish Arts Council’s pARTners Artist Residency Programme and the local authority, the Papdale residency will include a series of projects intended to create a permanent visual celebration, at a key moment in its history, of the school’s location and identity. Of central importance too, it will foster a better understanding of how artists and the visual arts work.

As well as being the first long term school-based visual arts residency in Orkney, it’s the first of any kind that Christopher and Matilda have attempted, either as individuals or as Christil Trumpet, but I got the strong feeling that given the kind of people they are and the kind of work they do, the residency will go very well indeed. The school itself initiated the project and teachers there seem well pleased with the way things look at the moment.

The main thing is they’re not here as teachers but to serve as “models of working artists”

With around 60 staff, Papdale is far and away the largest primary school in the county: indeed its roll of 560 accounts for nearly half the primary children in Orkney. The first stage in an ambitious programme of extension and refurbishment to its 50 year-old premises was completed in 2002, and the Head Teacher at the time, Lynn Whitelaw, saw the possibility for an arts residency that would fit very well within the context of the next stage of building work – six new classrooms and a second storey to part of the existing structure – which begins next month and is expected to finish in 2008.

Lynn left for a new post in Moray late last year, but the school management team, led by acting Head Teacher, Jane Bruce, was very enthusiastic about the project and continued to see the process through, with assistance and advice from Carol Dunbar, Education Development Officer at the Pier Arts Centre, and OIC Arts Development Officer Clare Gee.

There was considerable interest in the residency, both locally and nationally, and many applications. Jane, who has taught in the school for the past 26 years – her whole career in fact – was herself appointed Head Teacher of Papdale in May this year, shortly after the final decision was made to award the residency to Christil Trumpet.

“We are very excited about the residency,” Jane said. “We feel that it shows us to be an innovative school, which of course I hope we are, and we did want to have a strong artistic presence here that would help us move forward creatively as the new building work progressed.

“As well as contributing to the children’s experience of art, we hope that the artists’ work will contribute to the architectural aspects of the new school environment. As well as creating works of art for the school, Christopher and Matilda have great ideas for the use of space around the school environment, and they will be working with architects and lighting engineers to develop those.

“In general we were very impressed by the scope of the proposal that Christil Trumpet were making. Their enthusiasm is quite infectious for one thing, and I know the staff here have been very impressed by their approach. Their inclusion of community involvement in their plans and the links they proposed to establish with parents was something that impressed us, as well as their obvious professional skill. All these things were persuasive, and of course, two for the price of one – that’s hard to beat!”

Christil Trumpet moved in on 15 May, and I visited them at the school one morning that week, making my way through the cheerful kids, leisurely swarming before the whistle blew for line-up time. Having found the right door myself and signed the register, I was led onwards by Matilda, past the small chairs and tables, the computers, pegs, toys, classrooms calm with order, and corridor displays and notices fluttering back to rest after the invasion. Only one wrong turn, I think, but it’s a big place.

To reach the studio itself we left the school building again and made for the corner of the playground that’s now the interface between Christil Trumpet and the local educational world.

Behind an unremarkable portacabin exterior (which may or may not be tidied up later – a certain level of anonymity has a practical value) lies the bright and very adequate working space in which Christopher and Matilda have already installed some examples of their own work, including “Wedded”. These pieces will help introduce pupils and other visitors to the idea of the residency and to the way in which they work as artists.

We spoke about art as a curriculum subject and the difference between that and art as artists practise it. The main thing is they’re not here as teachers but to serve as “models of working artists”. For that reason, and because for half the time, proportionately, they have the opportunity to get on with their own work – which they’re expected to do at the school – the location of the studio seems well-chosen.

I asked Jane Bruce about this topic later too. “Art teachers do a super job,” she said, “covering key curricular skills in the staged and progressive way that’s defined, for example, in the 5-14 programme. But I see the residency as complementing that work. The artist in residence is much freer to open up a sense of what art is and to give the children an experience of art not easily available otherwise.

“Working in small groups is important of course, and so is direct contact with artists who are open to children’s ideas and provide a context that allows them to explore their ideas openly – these things help broaden the children’s experience of art.”

The lottery-funded pARTners scheme aims in general to give “Communities with little experience in the arts new opportunities to engage with professional artists”. Currently there are around 50 pARTners projects taking place up and down the country, involving a variety of host communities and artists of every type. The scheme is not simply a source of finance for residency projects, but provides support of other kinds too. Matilda had recently attended a pARTners event at the CCA in Glasgow, something she had found inspiring, and very timely.

“I felt really quite bolstered in my confidence in the approach we were planning to take. While obviously we’ve never been formal “artists in residence” before, we have done a lot of work with groups of different kinds, and we have plenty of experience with children of our own! But speaking to several delegates – people such as Alex Hetherington and the “Art Lassies” Rebecca Marr and Lisa Fleming – confirmed the importance of the idea that we remain artists and that we pursue our own interests artistically.

“Those personal contacts and the back-up available from the national pARTners organisation are useful. But so is the sense of ownership we’ve started to get from speaking to the staff at the school. They seem really interested in getting involved and in helping us get involved with the children and the school as a whole.”

As to the direction of the project overall, Christopher seemed pleased by the clarity of the school’s thinking. “It was the school’s request that the work we do here should be particular to the school and its refurbishment and rebuilding, and so reflecting that change is part of out brief. As well as looking forward to the future of the school at this point in its history, we will be looking to the past for what it tells us about where the school and community are today.”

One of the discoveries they made that has intrigued them was that the school stands where the “Duckie Pond” once provided recreational space for sailing model yachts. (In fact the pond remains a presence of a kind in the playing fields there, with more drainage work planned for in the near future.)

It was on the shores of that pond in April 1916 that the celebrated Orcadian writer and naturalist Robert Rendall found the Cardamine Pretensis Linn (var Uniflora) otherwise known as the Cuckoo Flower, rare in Orkney, and those historical connections will inform the work they do.

It’s hard to believe now that this populous residential district with its two schools (the other is Kirkwall Grammar School, which used to be on the other side of the hill in buildings that now house Orkney Islands Council) was ever anything else, but appropriately enough change and the ritualisation of change have been two of the main themes of Christil Trumpet’s work since the couple began collaborating in 2002 – appropriate too in the context of education and school life.

Plans for the residency seem ideally suited to Christil Trumpet’s established working practice, with interaction, flexibility and collaboration at the core. And fun. Their methods will include a school-wide game of Consequences, an opportunity for each child to contribute to a Wave of communal self-expression, and the recycling of bruck (junk, detritus) in ways that echo their own and other contemporary artists’ themes and procedures – for example H A Schult’s “Trash People”, and their 2004 exhibition “Foul Flora, Weird Waves”.

The school clearly sees a benefit in there being two of them working together, but I wondered how they themselves felt about that. Was it an advantage?

“Definitely. It helps stop us wasting time, since we sort of rein each other in if ideas start to get too far off course. We can talk through issues and worries and that helps maintain perspective. And it doubles the input as far as the children are concerned.

“But more than that, in many ways, although we began working collaboratively as Christil Trumpet four years ago, we are still in the early stages of developing the idea. This residency is a really great opportunity for us to discover the potential for us working together, and to find new and interesting ways for us to work as individual artists too.”

© Alistair Peebles, June 2006

Links

• Christil Trumpet