OVERLAPPING WITH YOUNG MINDS
ANNE BRADLEY INTERVIEWS JENNIE GUY ABOUT MOBILE ART SCHOOL AND OTHER PROJECTS EXPLORING THE ROLE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND CURATORS IN SCHOOLS.

Anne Bradley: How and why did you create the Mobile Art School?¹
Jennie Guy: I work in the art world and I’m also a parent. Another answer is that I’ve always been interested in – and critical of – education systems, since I was a teenager going through the system, up to when I was studying on my contemporary art MA and witnessing the ‘pedagogical turn’ in the contemporary art world. I think the overlap of artistic experience and younger minds is a winning combination. From the very beginning I could sense how substantial Mobile Art School might become, as education systems will always be in constant need of attention and reinvention, both from inside and outside the system.

AB: How do you approach schools and foster partnerships?
JG: Sometimes just cold calling. All it takes is one person – a principal or a teacher, for example – to provide a foothold for the project to be welcomed into a school. I’ve also been introduced to schools via arts festivals, other curators, arts practitioners and arts organisations. A project’s success can also generate momentum. Wicklow County Council have been incredibly supportive of the vision and we are now formalising plans for our partnership to move forward from one school into another later this year.

AB: You’ve described your approach as being ‘triadic’: based on relationships between curator, artist and student. How does this approach differ from the established artist-in-residence programmes within schools?
JG: My aim is to experiment with how the role of the curator can encourage a mutually beneficial conduit between students and artists. The goal is a sharing of processes that highlights vital links between artistic research and students’ potential as inventive learners. The way that I run my projects is based on my own professional interests in contemporary art practices, generally emphasising a sustained level of research and experimentation along with output. When the students engage – not only with an artist but an artist in relation to a curator (in an active working dynamic) – they begin to understand the real world of artistic production and all the relationships that make up our professional community. It dispels the notion of artists in the ivory tower.

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