Every year, Project Ability partners with Glasgow School of Art to offer student placements working alongside our artists in our studios at Trongate 103. Despite current lockdown restrictions, we are delighted to announce that we will still be collaborating with GSA students this year, albeit in a slightly different way! The chosen students will be joining online zoom sessions with ReConnect artists and their tutors to work on a collaborative project. We caught up with Maya, one of the students to talk about her project ‘Magpies’.
“For the duration of 10 weeks myself and a selection of the Reconnect artists have been undergoing a Zoom collaboration under the name of the ‘Magpies’. Magpies are famous collectors of the overlooked, and as artists we have been gathering unusual artistic ingredients from our everyday lives and just like the magpie, have been sharing them with one another on a weekly basis within the virtual ‘nest’ space.
These objects compile of many forms. They might be a doodle, a shopping list, something shiny found on the street, a vegetable you think is a funny shape in the supermarket, or a favourite song! This project is designed for the ongoing lockdown period and encourages participants to navigate the loss of opportunity and to ask one another what we find ourselves making; is it meals? Lists? Walks? We will present our everyday to one another, observing our movements, navigations and connections to objects. The way we surround ourselves with objects through which we then understand ourselves. We will use this alternative form of communication to mobilise the idea of togetherness and find new and earnest connections with one another, in spite of distance. These objects and building blocks of language will form the basis of the workshops, resulting in a diverse archive of outcomes consisting of pen to paper experiments, the written word, found objects, painting and photography.
We will set each other tasks and activities to establish trust, and then individualism; building the ideal foundations for dialogic access. As a student in my final year at the GSA, it continues to be an honour to share my personal methods of gaining artistic ingredients with the group to form authentic working relationships with each remarkable individual. Using a socially orientated approach, the artwork itself is the facilitation of a space to come together and express ourselves to a selection of strangers in importantly different ways. Bearing personal witness to our individual daily lives with an aim to ‘rehumanize’ and use art as a means to create faithful community partnerships. Maintaining a non-prescriptive approach, the project continues to evolve organically as the weeks go by, relying on both the thought and the felt position to build an archive of personal materials to be presented in an online publication in March.”
