Air Iomlaid currently showing at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Air Iomlaid

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh    10 April - 9 May 2010

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye    5 June- 25 July 2010

http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/exhibitions/current/

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6040780

 

 

Outline of Project

 Julie and a team of professional artists worked with pupils from Skye (P4–P7 + P1-P3) and Edinburgh (P6–P7) over an eighteen month period. In the summer term of 2009, they took the children out every week, teaching them to draw and paint outside.

 In the autumn, the children took part in two week-long exchanges, visiting and hosting children from their partner school and learning to engage with an unfamiliar place through drawing and painting. The exchanges were the most intense parts of the project, and were the points at which the development of the children’s drawing skills was most marked. In early 2010, they started work inside on collaborative largescale drawings and paintings of their own environment and the one they had visited on exchange, as well as working with poets, animators and film-makers to broaden their range of artistic responses.

 Tuition took place in stages. First, Julie and the other artists encouraged the children to gain a better understanding for form and space working with tone and texture using pencil and charcoal. Once their structural skills were more established they began using paint to learn about colour: the way colours work in relation to one another, in terms of cool and warm, light and dark; how undercolours create a depth and richness and how they can realise the structural forms in a more expressive way through this understanding.

 She describes this teaching method as a process of ‘getting fit’ artistically. The sketchbooks represent the heart of the project. The children drew and painted in these outside, in the urban and rural landscapes of Edinburgh and Skye, learning to look at the landscape in unconventional ways, and gradually gaining the confidence to be able to produce complex compositions. Over time they developed different ways of responding to their environment, with their own individual styles, some children choosing to focus in on a specific part of the landscape, and others tending to capture a broader expanse of land and sky.

After drawing and painting in their sketchbooks outside (regardless of weather conditions), the children would scale up their work from the A4 sketchbooks to A1 size either on site or inside. At the end of each day everyone would come together to discuss the work, with children being able to choose a specific drawing and explain why they liked it. This was an important time for them to learn from each other and become more confident in their articulation. Sometimes it was difficult for them to achieve the same level of spontaneity they achieved in their books, at other times the increase in scale gave them a chance to retain all the richness of the directly observed work with the freedom of their own individual expression.

Having developed their own individual works over a substantial period of time they then had the opportunity to work on a much larger scale on collaborative works. Julie and the team of artists went through all the children’s sketchbooks drawing on this rich source material, helping to structure the underlying compositions and enable the children to work together to produce four monumental compositions of the landscapes of Edinburgh and Skye – a version of their own environment and the one they visited. Using charcoal, the children could focus on the structural elements of the composition.

The children draw the landscape of their homes in a markedly different way from one they have visited for a relatively short period of time. In the latter stages of this period they began to make their own compositions, working out how they could bring the different elements together themselves. This especially influenced the Skye children’s version of Edinburgh and the two large paintings that followed, and represented a big leap of progress conceptually for the children.

 They worked with poets, animators and film-makers to explore further their engagement with the landscape and their visual work, finding in particular that animation is a good way to express the experience of drawing and painting outside in changing light and weather conditions.

Julie describes the process of learning to draw as ‘really concentrating, along with a combination of the way you observe something, and the way you use your hands, your head, your heart […] everything comes together in an expression of what is going on inside you as well as what you are looking at.’ The Fruitmarket Gallery has been delighted to work with Julie, and to see the effectiveness of her approach in engaging children with the practice of drawing.

 Air Iomlaid is an ambitious project that enacts The Fruitmarket Gallery’s commitment to education in practice and policy. The Gallery’s wider education programme offers children and young people the opportunity to learn through active, experiential learning processes by participating in activities that augment schools’ delivery of the curriculum. Central to the Gallery’s commitment is the belief that understanding comes through doing as much as through listening, and that memorable, interactive experiences lead to effective learning. Air Iomlaid is an emphatic demonstration of this belief in action.