A Professional Journey
I am very excited to share my most recent article
A Professional Journey: Teacher/educator/curator/mother/artist has just been published by engage, the national society for gallery education.
engage 35: Twenty-Five Years of Gallery Education
Winter 2014
Published by engage, London
A Professional Journey: Teacher/educator/curator/mother/artist
Annabel Johnson
Co-founder, Children’s Art School
In 1990, I was an A level student on the obligatory school trip to Paris inspired by an excellent Art teacher talking about Jean Francois Millet's, L'Angelus (1). I had what Rod Taylor calls, an ‘illuminating experience’ (2) - a defining moment in your education that begins to map out your career path.
At this point in my life a career in the arts was not straightforward. Coming from a middle class, professional family I was actively discouraged from taking art at A level and fought hard to pursue this direction. Following a daunting interview for an art foundation course in London I took a path not unfamiliar to middle class girls - an art history degree - with little understanding of the career options open to me. Looking back, it was a short module led by staff at the New Walk Museum in Leicester, tasking us with designing a trail for children that really engaged me.
I had no family or connections in the arts and no one to support and guide a strong feeling that this was the right path. Seeking security, I was quickly mopped up by the teaching profession and trained as a primary school teacher. At the time, around 1995-97 the profession was consumed by the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies(3) and I found limited outlets for developing creativity in the outskirts of London. Schools were still a few years away from the influential report, All Our Futures: Creativity Culture and Education (4) and increased funding from government for new audiences. Neo-liberal notions of creativity, the importance of the creative industries and their impact on profit and innovation were ideas that I had not yet begun to discuss (5) and the subsequent development of Creative Partnerships had yet to impact schools(6). I felt in a minority where I taught, frustrated in a crowded curriculum by the limited opportunities for teaching art in what I felt should be the most creative of environments.
Although I am not an 'artist' I relate to feelings of demotivation through lack of recognition and the chance to develop a specialism highlighted by Dean Kenning (7) in relation to the status of secondary school art teachers.
“[The issues stated above are] manifested symbolically owing to a common perception that teaching is no more than a safety net for those who cannot find employment in other fields or professions i.e. school art teachers are failed artists ... [The] Language of personal empowerment, while identifying a real problem, tends to reinforce ghettoization and fails to cut across borders in ways that may expose and challenge institutionalised and symbolic power relations ... reinforces the attack on status which is the structural cause of teachers feelings of low self esteem and of tensions between teacling and art practice.'' (8)
Without being aware of the theoretical grounding for my ideas, I was to address this issue in my future work in gallery education. I developed a strong desire to nurture and develop teachers' creativity and provide opportunities for working out of the classroom in more inspirational environments. I would work to encourage new perspectives and learning styles impacted by the work artists were doing in the field of education and pedagogy. It was only later in my career, encountering the work of theorists like Ranciere (9), that the language I used shifted from that of personal empowerment to working with a 'subject as an active agent rather than someone awaiting improvement.' (10)
In 2002, I found myself in the position to pursue an MA in Museums and Galleries in Education at the Institute of Education. This MA - now regularly seen on the CVs of those applying for gallery education positions - quickly broadened my horizons, awakening an appetite for theory and a passion for contemporary art. I began volunteering at the National Maritime Museum and did a stint on Tate Britain's Art Trolley. I quickly got the position of Schools Programmer at Whitechapel Gallery applying as a job share with a fellow MA student; we were both teachers and had a thorough knowledge of all school art education phases.
Two worlds collide
When I joined the Whitechapel Gallery in early 2002 the government was investing in new audiences and re-housing the arts through the Lottery. Gallery education was emerging as a distinct area of practice in the UK. It was a time of significant change within the visual arts and education sectors. The education department had two members of staff, a strong educational legacy (11, 12, 13) and had received major grants to develop long-term projects with schools. A pilot research project (SWAP) (14) had taken place, looking into long term collaborations between artists and teachers. The department was growing and needed someone with in-depth knowledge of the school system and how to work alongside teachers. Our employers recognised this and were keen to support us in developing other aspects of the role. According to Carmen Marsch, the development of critical gallery education within the institution requires
“ ... a willingness to take seriously views that substantially deviate from one's own position Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the effects of educational and knowledge hierarchies in the face of different world views, utopias and desires ... “ (15)
My horizons quickly broadened. I was reading around my subject, was visiting a wide variety of schools and talking to specialist teachers, whilst also learning about the complexities of the art world. These new experiences, not easily accessible to teachers often marooned in their classrooms, enabled me to reflect on my own teaching practice.
Only the year before, as a teacher, I had never heard of an artist in residence and soon after joining the gallery I naively asked a senior curator the meaning of Modernism. This naivete coupled with a strong empathy for teachers, enabled me to begin overcoming feelings of insecurity. I was now in a position to contribute in some way to what Nora Sternfeld calls the ‘unglamorous task’ of gallery educators: attempting to dismantle power structures and the collectively produced preservation of ‘auras of exclusivity’ in large art institutions (16).
My background gave me insights into the school sector often not shared by gallery staff outside and sometimes within education departments. I still find it startling how prevalent is the lack of understanding of what teachers do and the real barriers faced when visiting galleries with students. There are limited opportunities for the sectors to understand one another. In recent years with our work under greater scrutiny, there is pressure to engage large numbers of pupils in more schools through shorter projects with high visibility; slower, in-depth, collaborative projects are being pushed out. The potential for understanding is further hampered by limited opportunities for those from diverse backgrounds to enter gallery professions. An MA in gallery education seems to be the minimum qualification, alongside years of voluntary work and unpaid internships making it difficult for those in need of a competitive salary to find a way in. I was lucky, and in many ways privileged, but I believe it would be impossible for me to get the job I had for so long if I was starting out now. That concerns me. There should be more opportunities for those with real experience of schools to share this with the gallery sector perhaps by actively seeking to employ teachers and offering salaries on a similar pay scale, attracting those who have entered teaching for security and a way of supporting a family (17).
Working at the edges
In 2003 we embarked on an ambitious programme - Creative Connections - developing year-long projects with five schools and artists, using Whitechapel exhibitions as starting points.
Peer-led training sessions and repeat visits to the gallery and artists' studios fed into several follow up workshops in schools where new work was produced by artists and students alike. Each year culminated in a modest exhibition installed in the education studio and a meeting room at the gallery for one day, by the education team, the resident artists and any other willing hands. Very much under the radar of the institution, the exhibition was free from the influence of marketing strategies, house styles and the dominant gallery aesthetic, but began to bring a developing programme to the attention of the wider institution. I remember a senior member of staff questioning why the exhibition was only up for a day, when at the time a longer run in a key meeting space, with limited resources available to us, was clearly impossible.
As Moersch points out, this is not necessarily a situation we should lament as 'operating at the edges and developing a semi-visible practice has special potentials and qualities’ (18). At last in 2004 we got the exhibition spaces we craved for showing education projects. Whilst pushing our own practice as gallery educators, the spaces also sapped money, manpower and resources from project costs; they were fraught with problems and were in danger of shifting the emphasis of our work from process to product. Yet again we were hovering on the edges. Now we were competing on the same playing field as colleagues in the exhibitions department, but without the resources, experience and confidence to demand what we needed.
The developing programme aimed to give students from East London - who more often than not had never visited a public museum or gallery - increased confidence and ownership of the gallery space. It had many of the features identified by Morsch's description of the 'reproductive function' of gallery education. Oriented towards the excluded, it endeavored amongst other things
' ... to bring in children, young people and others uninitiated to these institutions and thus ensure the continuation of their audiences ... they are oriented to the constructivist turn in learning theory, according to which it is less a matter of instruction in contents than of providing environments that stimulate manifold and complex processes of independently constructed meaning. Along with learning specifics the point of these programmes is also 'general' in the sense of 'learning a love of art': generating a positive experience within the institution, recognising art's values and relevance and generating a desire to return.” (19)
We also supported teachers in using the gallery. Through a long-term partnership with a practicing artist, teachers engaged in their own, oftenneglected art practice. For me, this became one of the most interesting aspects of the programme. Without fully realising it, we were beginning to address notions of power and domination. Our attitude towards teachers went from one of paternalism to the construction of an atmosphere where artist, teacher, gallery educator and often students began to question who was teaching and who was learning. This moved the programme more in line with Morsch's 'critical deconstructive' function as we became increasingly aware of our own position touching on issues of 'structural violence' (20) fostering critique, self empowerment and adopting strategies of activism and critical pedagogy through engaging with artists holding an underlying belief in the power of education to change the world. In retrospect I can see that through residencies initiated between 2009-13 (21) we were moving closer to this kind of criticality.
In the 10 years I was at the gallery, through two maternity leaves and a mixture of part time roles, my job title changed from Schools Programmer to Schools Officer to Assistant Curator to Education Curator - with various Project Co-ordinator roles along the way. This in itself marks the changing role of education in the gallery during a time of increased investment and a major lottery funded redevelopment of the gallery. My work however changed very little, though my knowledge and level of engagement increased enormously; my salary over this period actually decreased.
Residencies: an emerging specialism
I continued to focus on developing long-term relationships between artists and teachers under the framework of the renamed Artists In Residence programme. Residencies continued to give artists a unique opportunity to work in a school developing a body of work in collaboration with students and teachers in response to this rich and politically contested setting.(22) We now worked with between two and four schools per year. Visits to the gallery were still central, but exhibitions were used as a starting point from which to talk about broader notions of art, and the focus shifted to developing new work in collaboration with the artist. Placing teachers and artists on an equal footing in the relationships brokered through the residencies, although often fraught with tensions, produced exciting results.
The Educational Turn
In 2003/4 the gallery's redevelopment and partial closure had helped us to look outward as an institution and refocus on the way artists were working. We were all reading Nicolas Bourriaud (23) and Miwon Kwon (24) and the gallery's community programme was reconfigured as The Street (25) under the guidance of curator Marijke Steedman, whose conversations guided much of our work at the time. Professionally we grew in confidence. It seemed less relevant to start from exhibitions curated by colleagues in the exhibition department. We sought more integrated programming, were commissioning artists and would soon have our own project spaces to curate ourselves. With more time spent researching artists' practices which questioned pedagogy- in particular the school setting as a site to develop a body of work - I was behaving more like a curator. (26) I was looking to question the relationship between school and gallery and the way artists, students and teachers could disrupt our thinking about these relationships.
As a result, the residency projects we commissioned were directly influenced by artists' practice, which became the dominant driving force. With reduced time, (27) I took advantage of any opportunities to travel and research, supported by a modest annual £200 grant given by the gallery. This gave me invaluable space to think, read and question what I was doing, away from the intensity of the gallery space and life with small children. It was also through intensified relationships with artists that I was inspired to read about and discuss alternative educational theories. I felt that it was the gallery's role, while listening carefully to the challenges facing schools, to introduce these alternative approaches.
It was commissioning Annette Krauss to work with us on an ambitious residency project with two east London schools that gave me the opportunity to push forward the transformative potential of gallery education with schools and finally see much of the theoretical work I had been struggling with over the past years put into practice.(28) Hidden Curriculum: In Search of the Missing Lessons (2013). The residency resulted in short films made by students, examining how through the physical environment of gallery and school, the legitimacy of each institution is coconstituted. The films speak to the unwritten rules governing institutions, how they direct the way we behave and look at the world, and how these directed behaviours can be unlearned.
Hidden Curriculum shows that we are wrong to assume that young minds cannot deal with philosophical questions and complex ideas.(29) Ideas were played out through actions, theory and practice were brought closer together and young people were eloquent in their games and short films. It was a revelatory project to watch unfold. However, it did make clear the problems of tackling such themes with the limitations of a schools programme, under the sole direction of a part time curator, with minimal support, limited control of budgets and limited time. (30)
Monthly visits from Krauss to schools and repeat visits to the gallery over the year allowed students to grow in confidence, gaining ownership of the gallery space and their activities within it. They had the freedom to play and observe how people reacted to their ideas. Backwards walking tours, word games and hide-and-seek replaced traditional tours designed to 'train' students in the correct way to experience art. In the final months of the project and when their work was installed in Whitechapel's Project Galleries, it was inspiring to see how far and how powerfully their ideas had been developed. But when it came to exhibition, their ideas were ultimately compromised as we did not have the resources to show the work as they wished.
This raises questions as to the place in the gallery hierarchy of projects commissioned by education departments, and more specifically a schools programme. In our enthusiasm to make the invisible visible, exhibitions can be hastily organised to fit unexpected gaps in programmes, desires of participants can be sacrificed due to restricted budgets, or squeezed to fit traditional gallery aesthetics and notions of good/bad art and the kind of art it is assumed people want to see. Competitive behavior can sometimes cause educators to appear as elitist as we have accused curatorial colleagues of being in the past. We are no longer an insecure profession, we have great clout in the art world, but we must continue to remind ourselves of our role to involve multiple perspectives and open art to people not necessarily engaged in the 'art world'. We start the next 25 years in a better position to do this.
engage - support, development, exposure, voice
In my early years at the Whitechapel, I was introduced to engage, which proved to be essential to my professional development in gallery education. It was through engage that I gained confidence.
I attended area group meetings and became an area representative. I took advantage of summer schools, spoke at conferences and training events, which helped me develop a solid peer network and learn key skills in a supportive, non-threatening environment. This was enormously helpful in my developing role at the gallery. In 2003/4 through Whitechapel's involvement in enquire (31) I played a key research role, working alongside colleagues covering my first maternity leave.(32) I was able to work flexibly, take part in pivotal research involving a project I had initiated, and develop new skills during my transition back to work. It was through these platforms that our programme gained recognition and funding to rehearse exhibition strategies before the development of the project galleries.(33) I was able to discuss the changing landscape and issues facing us, an opportunity rarely offered from within an institution where the schools programme was given limited status.
Motherhood, women and the arts
The gallery environment, without doubt has been key in my professional development, through the people and ideas I have encountered. It is an environment that pushes you to develop, and you are expected, rather than supported, to keep yourself up to date in your field. It was ultimately this pressure after I became a mother that drove me to look for other avenues. I was lucky to have guidance from hugely supportive individuals at crucial moments in my career. I was aware, though, that my professional development depended on these individuals - who had families of their own - and their ability to see what was needed. During more austere times, it seems harder for institutions to offer this support to women. The competition for key roles and part time positions is so great that women with young children, struggling to keep up, feel threatened and vulnerable. It takes enormous strength to compete in this playing field and success is very much dependent on the professional, personal, family and financial support structures that are in place. To progress to higher positions requires immense dedication and sacrifice. (34)
Andrea Franke in her project Invisible Spaces of Parenthood highlights the struggles of women trying to carve out careers as artists and cultural workers. Women have a tendency to secretly support each other, burying the reality from colleagues who are not parents. Much remains unsaid for fear of jeopardising our position and appearing not to cope. We may work for nothing, or many more hours than we are paid, out of a desire to question situations through work, or progress in our field. As mothers, our world becomes smaller and our time more precious. An uneven playing field is therefore created, where we depend on individual support structures, connections and financial situations.
Co-mentoring
It was during a period of particular struggle after returning to work after my second child in 2009 that I set up the co-mentoring scheme. This emerged from strong feedback from a focus group I convened of artists and teachers taking part in school residencies. Co-mentoring would give artists and teachers the opportunity to support each other over the course of a year in a space free of outcomes where they would devise their own focus and means.
As a participant, I saw first hand the value of a co-mentor who motivated me to keep connected in what was becoming a highly competitive and self-conscious workplace. This incredibly supportive relationship worked to break down power relationships between mentor/mentee/artist/ teacher and questioned the language that perpetuates divisions between those who work in schools and in galleries.(35) It helped me filter information, keep on my toes and 'appear' as critically engaged as other peers when I was under pressure at home. This has been the single most important factor in keeping me critically and professionally engaged in recent years.
For others, the programme nurtured the view that a teachers' art practice was of value in its own right, and something other artists could learn from. Dean Kenning discusses this premise at length arguing not for what art can bring to schools but what schools bring to art; he considers gallery education and particularly its work with schools to be the new 'avant-garde'.(36)
By handing over the power to co-mentors, the gallery became a gateway to new ideas; em powering participants take control of their own development. For a short time, teachers were released from day to day pressures, were given the permission to talk, play and focus on themselves. For those involved, there are countless testimonials as to the impact it had on their practices.(37)
In a profession dominated by young women, there is a real need for support structures to help them stay working when they have young families. This is especially true in London where living costs are high and salaries in the arts low - often barely covering the cost of childcare. I believe the profession in London is losing women, especially those without strong artistic support networks, because of the pressures on them from many directions at a critical time in their working lives. Franke's project points to many examples of women stopping work or decreasing their hours due to childcare pressures.
“A paradigm shift that needs to take place so that in 10 years time we won't be sitting here feeling isolated and frustrated, marginalised and discriminated against because we have children. 93% of women in the UK still take on the burden of primary childcare. Whether or not we live in this elite, culturally enlightened art bubble or not, we are still part of this statistic.' (38)
My own strategy for coping with the numerous frustrations and challenges outlined above is, for the time being, to take a step back from gallery education. I have chosen to concentrate on a new independent venture that fits in with the time and pace available to me. Children's Art School works in the refreshingly free spaces children have after school and in holidays. This space is free from an overloaded curriculum, tests, standardisation and pressure and has reawakened in me a love for educating, though, paradoxically I feel less like a teacher and more a mother, artist and curator with a practice of my own, making work alongside children and being inspired by them. We continue to work with artists who are invited to develop two-day courses for children, encouraging collaboration and independent thought. (39)
A new specialism is developing as I research artists who may be mothers, but above all have a strong interest in developing forms of education different from those which dominate today's competitive schools, which are increasingly sidelining independent thought and experimentation. We are experimenting with styles of education that ask children to make decisions about their creative learning, take control of the direction their work will go, delve in to democratic processes and above all learn to collaborate.
In these challenging times, gallery educators and education curators must look to the achievements of the last two decades and make the most of the increased strength and respect gained for our profession. We must hold on to the expertise we have in working with people from the widest of backgrounds, taking time to understand the positions of others and the knowledge they bring to our art institutions. We must remind ourselves that there are kinds of art other than that which the 'art world' validates, and have the courage to pursue and exhibit art that many people want to see, even if it does not fit a particular aesthetic. Otherwise we will perpetuate institutions that only speak to themselves and people like them.
Notes
1. Millet, Jean-Frarn;ois, l'Angelus, c.1857-1859. Oil on canvas. Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Taylor, R., (1993), Education for Art. London: Longman
3. Developed from the National Literacy Project, 1996. The National Literacy Strategy had two main aims: to improve the teaching of literacy in the classroom and to improve the management of literacy at primary school level. Similarly the National Numeracy Strategy was launched in 1998.
4. National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. (1999) All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education calls for the promotion of the creative development of pupils and the encouragement of an ethos which supports and values cultural diversity. It argues that creativity will be increasingly important to businesses and the economy in the next century and that the school curriculum will need to reflect this.
5. Kenning, D. (2013) What Schools Can Offer Art: Towards an Avant Gardist Conception of Gallery Education in Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Culture in Britain. p.1 O
6. Creative Partnerships (2002) http://www. creativitycultureeducation.org/creativepartnerships
7. Kenning sites the current low visibility and status afforded to art teaching in schools.
8. Kenning, D. (2013) op.cit.
9. Moersch, C. provides a useful summary of Ranciere's text The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1983) and his 'radical democratic vision of self learning' in Alliances for Unlearning: On the possibility of Future Collaborations Between Gallery Education and Institutions of Critique. Afterall 2011 p.12
10. Kenning, D. (2013) op.cit., p.13
11. Marsch, C. (2004), 'Oppositions to Interstices: Some notes on the effects of Martin Rewcastle. the first Education Officer of the Whitechapel Gallery 1977-1981', engage 15, Summer 2004. engage 15 Summer 2004
12. I can do that! Community Education at the Whitechapel. Whitechapel Gallery: London 1995
13. Artists and Schools, The Whitechapel's Education Programme in East London Schools. Whitechapel Gallery: London 1989
14. Schools and Whitechapel Artists Project worked in five East London schools with five artists over a period of three years and had some impact on the development of Creative Partnerships following similar guiding principles.
15. Marsch, C. (2011), 'Alliances for Unlearning: On the possibility of Future Collaborations Between Gallery Education and Institutions of Critique', in Afterall, Spring 2011
16. Sternfeld, N. (2010), 'Unglamorous Tasks' in Marsch (2011), op cit., p. 12
17. The Southbank Centre has recently appointed Henry Ward, former deputy head and Director of Art from Welling School as their Head of Education. This is exactly the level of experience galleries should be seeking to add to their staff, especially from those working directly with schools.
18. Marsch (2011), op. cit., p.5
19. Ibid., p.6
20. Ibid., p.7
21. Ania Bas: Isles of Silly 2009-10 introduced performative practices into a school questioning hierarchies by redaiming spaces for art previously lost to large-scale refurbishment and health and safety. Amy Feneck: Government Workers 2009-10 interrogated the values and ideals of education by observing the day-to-day activity of the school where she was resident, showing how architecture and design regulate students' behaviour, touching upon how, today, British education is increasingly managed from above. DARTER: 2010/11 questioned the influence of predetermined outcomes in the art curriculum, the intentions and consequences of placing artists within formal education and the ways in which these situated debates were played out within the gallery context. Lucy Cash: My Body Folded like a map 2011-12 addressed questions of race and gender in a striking intervention onto school hoardings investigating trust, intimacy, scale and anonymity.
22. Johnson, A. (2010), 'Why Artists in Schools?' in Bas, A., Isles of Silly. Whitechapel Gallery: London 2010. This publication gives a detailed rationale for the programme at the time.
23. Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses Du Reel: France
24. Kwon, M. (2002) One Place After Another. MIT Press: MA
25. Steedman, M. (2012)(Ed.), Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics. London: Whitechapel Gallery
26. This statement acknowledges the problem surrounding shifting job titles in education departments; the language and hierarchies involved. For me, 'feeling like a curator' involved a certain level of confidence in the debates surrounding my specialism. Researching and selecting artists that would further the debates rehearsed through my programme and presenting this rationale to colleagues. It was also about maintaining a certain level of care, trust and engagement with the artist, collaborators and their work during the process and execution of a project to its manifestation in the public realm, be this at school or in the gallery. It was also about the professional validation I felt from an increasingly respected profession.
27. As a mother of two children, research time previously undertaken in personal time was now more challenging.
28. This project is discussed in more detail in Johnson, A. (2014), 'Seriousness of Play', AD Magazine, issue 10, Summer 2014, National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) and Johnson, A., Ward, H and Krauss A. (2013) 'In Search of the Missing Lessons', aeS Arts and Education newspaper, issue 5, Autumn/Winter 2013, Welling Visual Arts.
29. Ibid., Krauss references theorists Paulo Freire, Jacques Ranciere and Augusto Boal.
30. Although the project had a healthy budget compared to other projects commissioned through the schools programme the ultimate disappointment was the limitations enforced on the execution of the exhibition, which had real potential to push boundaries.
31. From 2004-11, enquire supported projects with children and young people across England and associated research into the learning benefits to participants of engaging with contemporary art, galleries and artists. www.engage.org/enquire
32. When returning to work after my first maternity leave, although I was encouraged to return to my former position it felt too much at the time and I didn't feel confident in my ability to juggle the pressures. I returned as a freelance project coordinator for the programme I initiated. In hindsight a decision that damaged my career prospects, confidence and future earning potential. The flexibility afforded to me was more important at the time, masking the impact this would have on my future career. I ended up doing the same work for less money and status, admittedly with more freedom and flexibility.
33. In 2003, the second round of enquire funding allowed for this research into evaluation methodology and enabled us to show artists commissions in a week long exhibition at Bow Arts Trust, Nunnery Gallery initiated by Henrietta Hine, then Curator for Schools at Whitechapel and coordinator for enquire East London for phase 1 and 2.
34. Not wanting to have both parents working full time in demanding careers and handing over the childcare of our children to others we took the practical decision for the parent with the most was the limitations enforced on the execution of the earning potential to be the one to push forward a full time career.
35. Kenning (2013), op. cit., p.13
36. Ibid., p.4
37. A report on the value of this co-mentoring programme can be downloaded at the Whitechapel website.
38. Mullaney, M. in Franke, A. (2012), Invisible Spaces of Parenthood. London: Hato Press, p. 53
39. Ania Bas developed Magazines by Kids for Kids and Sarah Carne developed The Art of the Game
Images
1. Krauss, Annette, Hidden Curriculum: In Search of the Missing Lessons 2014. Installation. Whitechapel Gallery, London.
2-3. Annabel Johnson: Children's Art School course: Magazines for Kids led by Ania Bas and The Art of the Game led by Sarah Carne
4. Teachers and Artist session at Whitechapel Gallery 2013
5. Lopez de la Torrez, Ana Laura, Co-mentoring drawing, 2013. Ink on paper.
Thank you
I want to thank in particularly all the fantastic women who have helped me on my way.
Especially Ania Bas who has been a dedicated champion, friend, mentor, general inspiration and kicker up the backside!
Others who have impacted this article directly and indirectly through their support and conversations throughout my career are, amongst others
Martin Child: wherever he is. My first art teacher.
Mary Wheeler: an inspirational teacher
Helen Lloyd: another inspiring teacher/educator/mother/curator
Alicia Miller: Former Head of Education at Whitechapel Gallery, mother/farmer/writer..and numerous other things!
Marijke Steedman: Curator, Whitechapel Gallery and Create
Henrietta Hine: Head of Public Programmes, Courtauld Gallery
Jean Tormey: Tate Gallery
Caro Howell: Director, Foundling Museum
Pam Meecham: Institute of Education
All the mothers out there striving to find that perfect balance in life – you know who you are!
All the inspirational artists, children and young people I have had the privilege to work with.
My husband and children who encourage and inspire me everyday