Irish Museum of Modern Art
It’s never too late in Studio 10
By Lynda Cookson
‘When I was in my late twenties, I met a friend who was involved in art. I asked her about learning to draw but she said – well May, it’s a bit late now – now I know she was wrong, it’s never too late.’ These are the words of May Twomey, a member of the St Michael’s Active Retirement group who have been coming to Studio 10 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in the Kilmainham Royal Hospital every Friday morning since 1992.
A preoccupied murmuring and lowered heads above working hands greeted me as I entered Studio 10 one Friday morning. It didn’t take long for me to learn that there was mischief in those murmurs – the happy mischief that comes with a group of people thoroughly enjoying their time together while exploring their own abilities as well as that of established and famous artists.
The open studio with its drop-in programme – which means that anyone can join in whenever they wish, no previous art experience is necessary, no booking is required, nor is it necessary to attend every week – began this season in September and will run every Friday morning from 10.00 am to 1.00 pm until May 2007. Participants can work on their own projects in the studio or work with the facilitating artists on new projects. Frequent visits to the IMMA exhibitions and the resident artists’ studios are part of the programme to give participants a chance to discover the secrets of professional and famous artists producing modern and contemporary art.
There is no charge for these workshops and basic materials are provided. On the day of my visit participants were using pencils, rulers, carbon paper, charcoal and black felt tip pens on various types of paper to produce caricatures of the group as they worked, line drawings to challenge a mathematician, balloons and space ships, country landscapes, flowers and squiggles. Two artists, Claire Halpin and Chris Jones, were assisting 27 people in two spacious rooms with lots of fluid movements and concentrated moments discussing design, going on; big flourishing charcoal sketches were throwing down the gauntlet to scissors, small mathematical set squares and compasses while tracing paper and acetate worked their perfection. I was told that pottery and painting are also included in the activities during the season.
Over a cup of coffee in the café near the bookshop Lisa Moran, IMMA’s Curator of Education and Community Programmes, told me how, when the museum first opened, it was important to them to link in with local communities to involve them in the experience of the museum exhibitions; and she outlined the museum’s plans for the growth of the project: ‘It can go through stages of chaos with erratic attendance and we feel it’s still a new and experimental project. Studio 10, in its present open form, is only in its second year. We’re conscious of keeping the group’s attachment to the museum, emphasising what the participants are seeing in the gallery space; looking, discussing and responding to that in the workshop. We want to keep revisiting that connection, having the kind of discussions which question the artist’s intention and why they choose to use the materials they do. It’s facilitating experimentation, exploring and looking at things from a different angle and encouraging them to challenge assumptions and question the work. We’ve had some very interesting discussions. We constantly monitor the process, informed by people’s experiences, and if the project becomes too unwieldy we remain open to change. A strand of it may stay the same and become self selecting but we could also run parallel strands of the same model to accommodate the group’s needs. The idea is to give people a range of options.’
Wanting to know more about what regular attendees to the workshops felt I flipped through a report Lisa had given me entitled ‘Even Her Nudes Were Lovely’:
‘… even her [Mainie Jellett, artist] nude figures were lovely, they weren’t these big floppy fat ones …’
‘… and when you go home especially when you’re living alone you don’t feel so lonely because you know you’ve someone out there even though you’re not talking to them they’re there if you want them and you feel like one happy family …’
‘It’s all new to me because I went to school in 1941 … you were never ever brought to museums you were never brought to anything … the only thing I ever did in school was cooking … sewing and once a month brought walking to confession.’
‘Well through that really you kinda look at the world different, you don’t go around with your head on the ground, you’re looking at the shape of roofs and trees and the skyline and you see things.’
The Irish Museum of Modern Art is a comfortable five to ten minute walk from Heuston Station at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8.