Disability Arts Online

Anne Teahan

For me the process was a kind of detective story - I was looking at fragments of images from the dim and distant past, but also from my contemporaries. And of course my own experience is part of the process: I have been a pupil, a parent, an art teacher in an inner-city school (pre-disability). I found myself comparing recent urban deprivation with stories of hardship stretched over a long period of time, from various viewpoints, interpreted and filtered by individual temperaments. Throughout this process the same questions kept arising. Why would one individual experience their childhood in care as crushing and miserable, and another (their contemporary) as offering a life-saving structure? So the question in my mind was “What do children really need?” After many weeks of sifting, my response came as both a piece of writing and as visual art.

Through writing, it seemed to me that the history of children's education, whether mainstream or residential, was the story of sticks and carrots. The further back in time you go, the tougher and more crushing life was for children in institutions. And the lower you were in the pecking order, the more harshly you were treated. So at the post Victorian start of the story, school life was all stick and very little carrot. As the story gets closer to the present, education becomes more child-centred and focuses on rewards and the realising of potential rather than accepting limitations. So carrots took the form of praise, acknowledgment, treats and improving activities, (walks in the countryside, participation in pantomimes, entertainments, Father Christmases etc). And this trend was more intensely evident with children in residential schools.

My visual response echoed these thoughts in the form of a timeline. I made a series of fragile paper shoes from fragmented drawings, reformed in thin paper around children's shoes chosen because the very least a child needs for survival is footwear. The first story I heard - from a lady now in her eighties, was of her arrival at school aged ten, wearing cardboard shoes - which she unwillingly gave up for more sensible institutional footwear. My paper shoe timeline started with Dickensian footwear and finished with the branded trainers of the eighties. In between were: Sunday best shoes, sensible shoes, wellies for excursions, gardening and pantomime shoes. Branded trainers, to me, represent the external tyranny that dominates children's lives more subtly than the institutional punishments of earlier times.

These were exhibited in perspex cubes with digital images derived from the school building. I worked from a mixture of real people (my daughter's abandoned trainers) and found or bought shoes which fit the bill in terms of the style of a decade.

Jon Owen

Jon is a musician and sound artist. His 20 minute piece may be heard on this website and comprises sounds, music and the human voice. He has interviewed, recorded and layered the voices of grown up children recalling school stories spanning a period which included outbreaks of diphtheria and the Billy Cotton Band Show. Adult voices intertwine and overlap; their memories create images of sweet and sour childhood experiences - some heartbreaking, but recalled in voices without apparent bitterness.

In conversation he has been sensitive to the problem of how people may be represented in sound, and the medium's potential to release or distort their real feelings and statements. Hearing his piece creates feelings of empathy and identification with the childhood voices of the participants. The editing pulls together references and allusions to external events as well as individual experiences. There is a texture to the piece and rich visual imagery is evoked through sound and spoken phrases.

Rhythm, repetition and variation draw the listener into the life of an ordered institution. You can download the sample Jon made with the voices of residents from the institution or listen now in your media player.

TR3-launch_350.jpg alt="Photograph of installation" description="Panel from installation shows a collage of images, framed by a polished wooden veneer. In the centre is a blackboard with a series of memories written in italic script. Around the blackboard are a series of kettles, pots and pans, toothbrushes and toothpaste, arranged symetrically. At the bottom of the panel is a row of chidren's legs, hands placed in laps. The children sit on a white stool. On their feet are brightly coloured sandals" title="Tales from the Boarders installation by Damien Robinson"

Damien Robinson

Damien is a digital and sound artist. She describes her response to the adults' childhood stories:

“…I was constantly struck by the range and diversity of individual experiences in contrast to the elements of uniformity, repetition (and in the first half of the 20th century) regimentation”

Her piece employs a wide range of digital and physical processes. She creates old-style school desks which respond to vision and touch using magnetic and smart materials, unimaginable in the days of residential rote learning. She breaks the uniformity of black and white institutional photos of school shoes, socks and ties, using colour and text to retrieve the children's individuality. (see gallery)

She quotes memories in copperplate text, and makes a telling reference to a classic nursery rhyme:

“Girls And Boys Come Out To Play draws on the apparent origins of that eighteenth century rhyme, a time when most children had to work, and play could only happen after dark. The school's origins, with the emphasis on taking children from deprived backgrounds and making them into a viable workforce, is contrasted with walls and barriers of expectation and limited horizons, subverted by those (staff and children) who looked beyond, for themselves and for others.”

The Exhibition

Common Features

We met occasionally at different stages in the process. So it was interesting to hear fragments of each other's ideas followed by the eventual surprise of seeing and hearing the finished work for the first time at the exhibition, which opened in the old school building. Because we use very different artistic processes, and worked separately it was fascinating to discover overlapping ideas and parallel forms.

Voices and Sound weave through the whole project either physically or metaphorically. The notion of the child's voice being just about heard, either through quotations from letters home - (where the real meaning may have fallen between the lines) (Damien); through the actual sound of their adult voices recalling childhood feelings (Jon) or in response to statements about what they valued or resented (Anne). Also, ideas about the lost or missing words in the many gaps in the documentation.

Repetition and Rhythm run throughout, in the formal structures and imagery, echoing the tension between the individual child and the ordering of many lives through school uniforms and institutional routines. Clothing and the motif of footwear in particular emerged in all our work.

Memory and Touch and their associations: my work looks very tactile, but my paper sculptures are too fragile to touch. (examples) Damien's desks invite touch, with their movable pieces which change colour in response to tactile temperature and with raised surfaces responding to fingertip investigation.

Collage and Fragmentation run through all three artworks. Damien uses digital processes to combine images from different times and settings. Jon's sound piece brings fragments of past and present together. My paper shoes tear and reconnect fragmented drawings. Collage implies disconnection and reassembly of things once whole. So the act of sifting created parallel structures within the art.