Creativity, Education & the Resilience of Ukrainian Art: A Conversation with Rob Garrett

Rob-Garrett-with-artworks-07.2026-ph-by-Rob-Garrett-20260731_160846.jpg, default, Rob Garrett with his artworks, 2026, photo: Rob Garrett

photography & visual arts

What can art teach us about creativity, resilience and human dignity? New Zealand-born artist, curator and educator Rob Garrett reflects on his life and work in Poland.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Garrett has shared the work of a Ukrainian artist on Facebook every day, creating a remarkable online archive. In this conversation with Culture.pl, he discusses art education, the Polish art scene, cultural memory and the role of creativity in supporting psycho-emotional well-being.

Anastasia Kanarska: Your career has taken you through many different roles – as an artist, curator, educator, arts manager, translator, and now a YouTube creator. Looking back, what has been the common thread connecting all these experiences?

Rob Garrett: I think there are two threads, intertwined to form one: creative making and being a conversation-starter. The roles of creator and communicator are deeply intertwined, and together they drive me out into the world with curiosity while anchoring me inwardly.

I remember deciding I was going to be an artist from the age of 5 years. Random, precocious, inspired? Doesn’t matter – it stuck, and here I am… I recall too that an aspect of this involved close observation of nature in my surroundings. As an adult, and especially as a teacher, I know that creativity, play and experimentation are capacities all children possess. Given the right opportunities, they can become lasting forces in a person’s life – but they can also be lost or allowed to fade. I was lucky to have certain transformative experiences that kept me on the creative path – thus reinforcing my juvenile intuition that this was ‘my’ path.

Then, aged 14, I also decided I wanted to teach, and again here I am, still teaching and still learning. Gradually I became aware that for me, teaching was about enabling others to connect inwardly – with their creative core – to connect socially and culturally with others and the world around them. Also, and in answer to your question, I know that all the other roles I have had involve these same dimensions: listening and observing, learning and sharing, supporting and encouraging, and disseminating discoveries and insights. So, whether I was working as an educator, curator or arts manager, each role involved being a storyteller, an enabler and a collaborator – inspiring others, creating workable processes, supporting self-discovery and walking alongside people.

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Rob Garrett, photo; courtesy of the artist

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AK: Before moving to Poland, you held senior positions in New Zealand's cultural sector, including at Creative New Zealand, and worked on the country's pavilion at the Venice Biennale. What brought you to Poland, and what has living here changed in the way you think about art and culture?

RG: Seven years before returning to Poland in 2013 – having first visited in 2005 as a guest of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art – I gave up salaried employment and began a new chapter as a freelancer. My bold assertion was that I might be able to not only survive but thrive doing everything I loved, and I was surprised to find that within three months of starting, I was living off my new self-generated income. From the start, an important aspect of my plan was to use success in New Zealand as a launch pad for moving to Europe. Long story short, it all started very well, then the global financial crisis of 2008 collapsed all my project funding streams and my income, and I learned how to live on zero income for nearly a year and how to hustle vigorously until I gained work as an expert advisor and curator of city-wide public art programmes. All the while, I was writing one open-call application after another when intriguing European culture organisations were looking for project curators in my field. Gdańsk was the first successful application.

The opportunity to curate the fifth edition of Gdańsk’s ‘Narracje’ festival of art in public spaces in the Long Gardens (Długie Ogrody) came through the first international competition I had won. My curatorial framework focused on aspects of the environmental, social and architectural history of the district which dated back to medieval and Renaissance times although the local population’s settled history only went back three generations. So, in 2013, Poland beckoned me to return for my second (research) and third (festival realisation) trips; and I fell in love with TriCity (the agglomeration of Medieval-Renaissance Gdańsk, Secessionist Sopot and Modernist Gdynia).

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Rob Garrett (left) leading a curator's tour at the 2010 NZ Sculpture OnShore exhibition, photo: Mark Meredith

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The private primary school where I now teach was looking for qualified native English speakers. The school heard about me, invited me to give a demonstration lesson and then offered me a job. It is a very happy situation for me – the result of tenacity and good luck! I am very grateful for all the help and support I have received so that I can live my dream.

The question about changes to the way I think about art and culture is interesting. Because of my background as a site-specific installation artist and as a performance artist, having to adapt to new contexts and situations is all part of the process. Those adaptations are a part of the process – always involving investigation and discovery and evolving ways of thinking and making. When I worked as a curator with artists it was also mostly in the field of commissioning new artworks for site-specific situations – such as outdoor exhibitions, public art biennials, or city-wide public art programmes. As such, the best form of thinking is responsive and collaborative, rather than fixed or predetermined.

But when I reflect on whether I have experienced profound shifts in my thinking about art and culture because of living and working here in Poland, I would have to say yes, in relation to teaching and learning. I teach mostly Polish children in a private primary school, where I teach the standard art curriculum to classes of 18 students at a time. As for how I teach, my school has given me great freedom to use my own judgement. Consequently, I can try new ways of teaching and observe how students engage with the learning environment.

Having the chance to teach art to children aged 9-14 years for a sustained period of time for the first time in my career – In New Zealand, the youngest children I taught were 13 years – has enabled me to rethink the ways art education can benefit this very important developmental stage in children. During that age span, from 9 to 14 years, children undergo profound shifts in self-expression and self-awareness, and in the way they perceive others and their surroundings.

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Hand Printed Leaves – Printmaking in class or at home for students aged 10+, by Rob the Art Teacher

The COVID-related isolation, lockdowns and online learning experiences also dramatically altered the social, emotional, and psychological landscape for children and teachers. It was an intense period of learning for me as I started my YouTube channel at that time while also seeking out and reading a lot of scientific studies on isolation trauma, children’s development, and the relationship between creative activity and mental wellbeing.

I have learned much from the children, my reading, and my pedagogical experiments in the classroom. I believe I am a changed teacher. Previously, I thought that prioritising artistic skills and processes was the best path. Now I know that the best approach is to create open-ended situations with as much free choice as possible – after all, how much real choice do children have in their lives? Building free choice into every learning situation enables children to grow their creative selves with a lasting respect for the power of their own imaginations. The open-endedness of these learning situations empowers children, and research suggests that the uncertainty involved in healthy, exploratory activities can increase engagement and contribute to a sense of well-being. Then, for the teacher, skills building can become ancillary rather than central, added as micro-lessons 1-on-1 or in small groups as an immediate response to observed learning readiness.

Nowadays thanks to my Polish experiences, I can answer the big ‘why do I teach art?’ question in changed ways. My purpose is to help children trust themselves, take risks without jeopardy, and develop the social cohesion skills required to make each lesson a safe and inspiring space. It is about helping children value and nurture their ability to play, experiment, and exercise their divergent thinking skills well into their teenage and grown-up lives. Overall, it’s about helping children understand, through their own experiences, how so many of the creative processes we apply in art classes are useful life skills, specifically useful in restoring personal balance and maintaining psycho-emotional well-being. My thinking is less about art and more about well-being. Art is a means to a more profound end: human dignity and psycho-emotional well-being.

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Rob Garrett, photo: courtesy of the artist

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AK: You have now spent several years living and working in Gdynia. How do you see the Polish art scene from the perspective of someone who came from the other side of the world? What has surprised or inspired you the most?

RG: Yes, it is interesting to think about how so-called outsiders view us. Even before my first visit – to Warsaw in 2005 – which was an art networking visit, I had positive expectations based on a handful of artists I was a little familiar with: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Katarzyna Kobro, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, Wojciech Fangor, Wilhelm Sasnal, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Artur Żmijewski.

That said, my impressions largely come from those artists I have had the pleasure and privilege to work with, and those whose exhibitions I have chosen to take my young students to – so it is perhaps skewed positively, because since 2018, I have not been trying to make a more comprehensive scan of the local scene in the way I was used to when curating in New Zealand.

In 2005 in Warsaw, I formed some inspiring impressions during only a one-week stay, mainly because of the access I gained to interesting artists through the contacts I had made while working in Venice: Hanna Wróblewska and Magda Kardasz (Zachęta – National Art Gallery), Joanna Mytkowska (Venice project curator), Jarosław Suchan (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art) and the Galeria Raster founders (Łukasz Gorczyca, Michał Kaczyński, and Joanna Kaimer).

During that week, I quickly learned something fundamental about Polish social behaviour: as an international colleague of my hosts, I was welcomed into every new connection as if I were family, with extraordinary warmth, generosity and openness. It was only years later that I could put this into perspective when I also experienced the aloofness of public sociability, especially in the middle and older generations. This made me realise how special those first Warsaw impressions were, and I experienced that same warmth and openness when I started working in Gdańsk, and later in Szczecin and Gdynia.

I was also inspired by the cultural organisations I visited or worked with, many of which were helping to lead a shift towards greater institutional openness and transparency in Poland. For instance, staff at Gdańsk’s Instytut Kultury Miejskiej, were at pains in every media interview and public announcement to make it clear that my appointment as curator of 'Narracje: Unearthing Delights' was by jury selection from an international competition.

What inspiring impression did artists make on me? I have long admired something that my American friend and academic colleague Dr Carol Becker wrote about what artists do well (at the time, she was Dean of Faculty and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago): artists take the personal and abstract it, or they take the general and personalise it. In other words, the best artists are good at taking their personal experiences and transforming them artistically so that others can recognise something familiar; or they take seemingly abstract phenomena and find and express a human dimension, or connection, within that awakens people’s empathy.

Working with Polish artists, I found these capabilities time and again. Mostly the artists I was working with were responding to an open-call or an invitation to create new artwork for a site-specific public space, or a thematic exhibition. Such scenarios involve a delicate balance for the artist between their own authentic art expression and their identification with and interpretation of an aspect of the site, the curator’s overarching concept, or the exhibition theme. If they lose their authenticity the artwork feels like a lifeless illustration of an idea. If they don’t find a personal connection with the given context or concept, the art will feel narcissistic. I worked with wonderful emerging and established artists who navigated this borderland beautifully. Every one of these experiences was inspiring to me.

One of the principal strengths these artists drew from their training and the wider Polish art scene was a strong sense of creative autonomy. 10 years ago, Poland’s commercial gallery scene was relatively underdeveloped, and I saw this as beneficial because it meant there were few commercial pressures on the artists to follow a trend, to be too seduced by collectors’ preferences, or swayed by auction house sales figures. This freedom from market pressures also extended to the institutions, which, in my experience, were staffed by professionals of great integrity and intellectual rigour, many of whom I mentioned above. In this respect, what might have looked like Poland lagging behind Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Asia in the development of its art market was, in my view, actually an advantage: Poland was ahead of the game in preserving artistic freedom and institutional rigour.

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Rob Garrett, self-portrait with illustrations from Book III, 2026, photo: courtesy of the artist

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AK: Culture.pl introduces Polish culture to audiences around the world. As someone who has spent years interpreting and explaining art across different cultures, what do you think is the biggest challenge – and the greatest opportunity – in making a country's culture meaningful to international audiences?

RG: One of my earliest challenges in accessing information was the Polish language. I often said that Poland felt like a linguistic island, making the country seem very distant to outsiders. Things have changed substantially since those days. More material is online and searchable; web portals can reliably translate Polish content when the sites themselves are not multilingual; and many cultural institutions in Poland demonstrably perform as if their audiences are local, national, and international. I have begun with language because it may seem like the most obvious challenge, and because I am aware that many Poles are very self-conscious when they try to communicate in English – in my experience, they are always far better communicators than they think they are.

However, in terms of making a country’s culture meaningful to international audiences, much can be lost in translation.

Artists usually think in their native language. Their reflections on and explanations of their own work, motivations, processes, and creative journey are all nuanced in the native tongue. When I was working for Creative New Zealand, I had the pleasure of visiting Literaturhaus Berlin in Germany (we had a writer’s residency programme in Berlin at the time). Literaturhaus Berlin had wrestled with this issue of the creator’s native tongue in a very creative way, and this inspired and influenced the way I was to work with artists as a curator in later years. Literaturhaus Berlin devised a poetry translation project. Poetry now seems to me to be one of the most difficult forms of language to translate, alongside idioms and jokes. For its poetry translation project, Literaturhaus Berlin paired poets writing in two different languages with a translator. For example, when a German poem was being translated into Polish, the team consisted of the German poet, a Polish poet and a German–Polish translator. Together, they created a Polish version that was expressively equivalent to the original, rather than merely a literal translation.

Years later, on a curatorial residency in the city of Nice, France, for several of the artists I met with I took an excellent translator with me, knowing that moderately good English is more likely to cause the artist to abridge rather than explain, and even possibly unintentionally misrepresent, their intended meanings. The careful involvement of a translator also creates space in the conversation for the artist and curator to explore the important nuances.

Why are these stories important? I feel that one of the biggest challenges in making a country’s culture meaningful to international audiences is for the artists firstly to recognise their own voices, their own words, in those disseminated stories. Artists must be able to see themselves in the stories we tell of their artworks.

Curators, art historians and cultural institutions are usually attuning their language and stories to the ears of their audiences. My challenge is for these disseminators to understand their first audience is their artists. I am a firm believer that the job of nuancing our culture stories involves understanding and honouring the artist’s voice, weaving that into the curator’s or historian’s contextual or wider narrative, and framing all that in ways that will elicit understanding, empathy, and inspiration in the audience. All this is a human role!

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Nōtan (濃淡): Making your first Nōtan design, with Rob the Art Teacher

AK: Today, many people know you as Rob the Art Teacher. What inspired you to devote so much of your work to art education, and what do you think children can teach adults about creativity?

RG: What can I say? When I decided at the age of 14 that I wanted to become a teacher, I was inspired by the previous nine years of positive and affirming education, as well as by several particularly inspiring teachers. These included my middle school music teacher whose youth choir of 80 singers – the Belmont Singers – I joined at age 12 years, a boys’ high school music teacher who was a French horn specialist, a composer, and passionate about Renaissance and early Baroque singing (I joined his a cappella/madrigal choir too), and my young science teacher who was an enthusiastic ball of inclusive energy!

Now, after being taught or mentored by some amazing educators and artists through my teens and 20s, and having taught in New Zealand high schools and art academies, and a primary school in Poland, what do I know?

To watch very young children play is to observe that experimenting and trying new things is like breathing – routine and without effort – and it is to witness divergent thinking in action. These two things – curiosity about new things and ‘what if?’ curiosity – are what many, may I say most, adults lose! And the losing starts as early as 12 and 13 years old. Unfortunately, schools are part of the problem because they model passive learning and train conformity through their highly regulated environments, compartmentalised knowledge, and over-testing.

So, what I think children can teach adults about creativity is that it is a life skill, not simply a path to a career as an artist. All adults ought to reconnect with the curiosity, divergent thinking, problem-solving, and courage they routinely exercised as very young children. I ask my young students to understand these things as their superpowers and to hold on to them. Because we all forget what it was to be a toddler, my students and I reflect on how their baby siblings and cousins negotiate their worlds – how they learn to crawl, to walk, to eat for themselves, to dress themselves. My students laugh as we remember the ‘never give up’ attitude, observation skills (we learn to walk by mimicking those around us), and problem-solving skills we all shared at the same age as the toddlers at home.

AK: Your YouTube channel has attracted viewers from around the world. Has teaching online changed your understanding of what art education can be in the digital age?

RG: Yes, and yes… My first experience teaching online came within the first two weeks of Polish schools going into lock-down at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It was a matter of speed learning! Because of the lockdowns, I found I also had more time on my hands, so, once I had mastered the technical requirements of online teaching and learning, I began to modify my teaching methods and then think more expansively. My YouTube channel arose directly from these early days of reflecting.

On social media, I found and joined many groups for art educators, where teachers across the globe sought help, shared resources and offered one another moral support during a difficult period. I saw an opportunity to create video lessons that I could use in my own classes and share with other teachers and with parents whose children were learning at home. I was also very conscious of the opportunity I had to ‘give something back’ for all the support I had received during my teaching career. I liked the idea of sharing my insights, methods, and teaching philosophy – free to anyone who wished to access it. I was also happy to let the audience grow organically and not worry about subscription and engagement data. My most popular video, ‘Avoid the Missing Background Mistake: Learn the Secret of Paul Klee’s Grid’, has reached 42,000 views in four years – far more people than the roughly 250 students who took the same lesson with me in person during that period. I am very grateful for that, but it is not about the numbers. I am equally encouraged when I receive direct feedback from a teacher that they are using my videos as the basis for some of their lessons, or from a parent who sends me photos of their children’s artworks after using one of my videos during a family art session at home.

However, as many educators return to in-person, pencil-and-paper teaching in response to a growing body of concerning research on the effects of excessive digital exposure on children and young people, I am taking a break from uploading new content to my channel. I have also been influenced by the dystopian flood of AI-generated content on YouTube. In my classroom, this shift has required little effort because we were already working with pencils and paper, without digital art-making or AI-assisted creative work. I am concerned both by emerging research into the effects of relying on AI during the creative process and by the copyright issues surrounding AI training models. Because my classroom is entirely digital-free, students do not use phones or tablets for personal research. Instead, I have re-established an old-fashioned classroom library of illustrated books. I also avoid using the smart screen and expect students to take handwritten notes, in their own words, on the aspects of each lesson that seem most important to them.

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Avoid the Missing Background Mistake. Learn the Secret of Paul Klee's Grid with Rob the Art Teacher

AK: Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, you have published a Facebook post every single day dedicated to a Ukrainian artist. Do you remember the moment you decided to begin this project? Did you ever imagine it would become such a long-term commitment?

RG: The moment I began this project was very clear in my mind. For a few days before February 24, I had been watching reports of activity along the border online, and already I was hoping ‘surely not!’ and thinking ‘what if?!’ As soon as video started flooding in of the first rockets and tanks across the border, I lifted my eyes to the east (the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only just beyond the horizon from my flat) and wondered if Poland would immediately be on the front line too. Looking out my kitchen windows, the full-scale invasion felt very personal, and the immediacy of the existential threat to Ukraine was palpable.

Of course, living on Poland’s Baltic coast where whole communities immediately sprang into action with support for Ukraine, I also felt part of a grassroots movement. But I was also aware of how such initial bursts of helpful energy and action can weaken over time. So, I chose a form of support that I knew I was good at – disseminating information about artists – and I knew it was something I would be able to sustain, unbroken, day by day. Did I know it would be four years and counting? No. But conversely, I did not expect it to be all over in a period of months! So, yes, I was preparing myself for a long-term commitment.

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Rob Garrett teaching cardboard relief printing with 5th graders at The American Elementary School in Gdynia, photo: Giuliana Lonardi

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AK: Over the past four years, your Facebook page has grown into a remarkable archive of Ukrainian art. What has this daily practice taught you – not only about Ukrainian artists, but also about yourself?

RG: Well, I am humbled by the experience. I knew it was likely to be worthwhile. I was confident I could sustain the commitment over the long term (I have done several long term voluntary cultural projects in the past). But until it unfolded and I experienced the amazing diversity of cultural forms, received the messages of support and explanations of why I should continue with the posts, and witnessed the tremendous organic growth of a truly engaged audience, I could not ‘know’ all these things.

Ukrainian artists are amazing in the face of the existential horrors of the invasion. Their creativity and courage are inspiring. Art is life! Every artist I feature is like a flag held high or a phoenix rising from the flames.

AK: For many people outside Ukraine, your posts have become a first encounter with Ukrainian art. Has this experience changed your understanding of social media as a tool for preserving cultural memory and building international awareness?

RG: Oh goodness, yes! Although I recall that I first opened my Facebook account nearly 20 years ago, for the express purpose of documenting and disseminating in real-time an ephemeral and performative public art project in Downtown Auckland that I had commissioned from German artist Ines Tartler ('Golden Auto Garage' 2008).

But in terms of the Ukrainian project, neither the content – 99% of which is sourced online – nor its daily dissemination and organic community growth would have been possible without social media. The project now has 5,000 ‘friends’ and 12,000 followers, with some posts generating up to 17,000 engagements. These social media platforms are far from perfect as we know, but the community-centric, single-issue theme (Ukrainian artists) appears to have brought out the best in the platform. I have had to deal with antagonistic bots, a few haters, malicious complaints intended to have my account removed, and the platform’s mercurial content-moderation rules. However, I have no tolerance for the former and have learnt how to navigate the latter, so the project continues to thrive.

Although 60% of the project’s audience is Ukrainian, feedback from the remaining 40% gives me confidence that it is reaching a broad international audience and, I hope, raising awareness one day at a time.

My Ukrainian community has been incredibly generous and encouraging. The posts have become a space where people celebrate creativity, and readers often recommend artists they think I may not yet have featured. I have also been able to turn to the community for advice – most recently, one of my Ukrainian contacts online helped me confirm that two artists I was unsure about were, in fact, Ukrainian.

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Ukraine. An Artist a Day. The First 100 Days (1-100), by Rob the Art Teacher

AK: Throughout your career, you have worked with artists, institutions, and audiences across New Zealand, Europe, and beyond. What role do you believe artists and cultural institutions should play in times of war, uncertainty, and social change?

RG: First, I do not think that war, uncertainty and social change are equivalent conditions. However, what I have come to believe about the role of artists during wartime may also apply more broadly. Since 2022, observing and interacting with Ukrainians confronting a genocidal aggressor has made my view of what artists should do in wartime much clearer. Before then, I might have offered well-meaning ideas or advice, but I would not have spoken as categorically as I do today.

Now, it is clear to me that the one thing an artist should do in times of war is follow their heart. Funny, this sounds like such a cliché in peacetime. But it is not. If art is one of the visible expressions of freedom, then no one can tell an artist what they ought to do, especially now when so many sacrifices are being made to preserve territorial and cultural freedoms. Another reason ‘follow your heart’ is the best advice I can think of, is that it legitimises diversity of expression and multiplicity of art forms. What diversity of individual paths have I witnessed? Artists so affected by the start of the war that they could not create (for an extended period).

Artists who have lost their homes, studios, workshops and artworks in missile or drone attacks have been forced to begin again – an immense act of courage, both technically and emotionally. Others have fled the country or relocated within Ukraine for the sake of their children, partners or parents, often leaving behind the materials and equipment essential to their work, sometimes recovering them later and sometimes not. Some displaced artists have turned to digital media because it offers greater mobility and fewer storage problems. Some people who had never considered themselves artists have begun drawing or painting as a way of processing personal trauma, while others have taken up traditional Ukrainian art forms, such as Petrykivka painting, to strengthen their connection to their cultural identity. Some artists have abandoned their former themes and visual language in favour of wartime or explicitly Ukrainian subjects; others have consciously continued working as before, in a defiant assertion that ‘we are still here, we are still alive – art is life!’

My other piece of advice, wherever possible, is to show as much of your work online as you can, using whichever platform suits you best. The abundance of Ukrainian art online shouts out to the resilience, creativity, and diversity of Ukraine and its peoples. I have also found this visibility helps build community and enables others (such as me) to share stories of creativity.

What about cultural institutions? In the visual arts, there is a longstanding mandate to collect, document, research, restore, protect, repatriate, educate and disseminate isn’t there? In a way, nothing of this changes. But the urgency and circumstances do change. Museums and other cultural institutions have been destroyed. Art collections have been stolen by the aggressor. Artists have been purposely mis-identified as not Ukrainian. These and similar war crimes require careful documentation and research, both to support future war-crimes proceedings and to pursue the repatriation of stolen collections. Perhaps the only change is in the emphasis: in times of genocidal warfare, the institutions carry a particular burden to preserve and re-tell the national stories with considerable urgency.

I see much of this happening through the window of my online research on Ukrainian art and artists, and in my conversations with Ukrainian artists and cultural workers. I also see new and renewed energy in NGOs, volunteer groups, social media groups and community pages, and online databases of artists organised by workshop, city or period – all dedicated to documenting, preserving and sharing Ukraine’s many art histories. My Ukrainian project has certainly benefited from the growing accessibility of these online resources.

Since 2022, the war and the sense of uncertainty that of course reaches far into Poland have also changed the way I work as an artist. I now work exclusively on small-format sheets of paper, ranging from A6 to A2, or in A5 sketchbooks. Partly this is because I have the consciousness of a migrant (since coming to Poland by choice) and a desire to be able to travel lightly. Also, having long held to the mantra ‘expect the best, prepare for the worst’ I want to be able to easily bundle up my many hundreds of drawings and paintings and courier them to my daughter in New Zealand – if I must.

AK: Finally, after all these years of working across cultures, what continues to inspire your curiosity? Is there a project, idea, or dream you still hope to realise?

RG: What continues to inspire my curiosity? The fact that it is still possible to learn. There is a wonderful true story that I can recount from my childhood, where this pattern of always learning was set.

My mother and her elder sister were raised during the Great Depression by a courageous independent woman. My grandmother had her own business as a dress maker and seamstress, but as a divorced woman was unable to rent apartments or premises because of the stigma attached to being a solo mother. Eventually she married again, but a consequence of this was my mother being forced out to work at the age of 12, despite graduating primary school top of her class. The rest of her life she pursued both formal and informal learning opportunities constantly and always shared the discoveries of this life-long passion with her children at the end of each day. I grew up understanding that there was always more to learn about what I was observing, reading or hearing, and that deeper layers could be discovered through reflection, questions and investigation. Now, it feels that my curiosity is completely hard-wired within me. But I know its genesis.

Making art every day and working with primary school children (currently aged 9-14 years) are both learning situations.

My deepest, abiding dream is quite modest: to make art, every day if I can, and to do this as long as I can, because it brings me joy, and because it always confronts me with some degree of the unknown, or new discoveries, and more questions than answers. The uncertainty experienced each time I start a new artwork satisfies my inner self.

The social ‘me’ has a complementary dream: to teach art with as much subtlety, kindness and wisdom as I can, for as long as my mind and body allow. Creating open-ended situations in which students have as much genuine choice as possible also makes every lesson an open-ended learning experience for me. I constantly devise new ways of teaching subjects I have taught for years because I want to see how children respond to the challenges and methods I offer, and how they transform them through the freedom of choice and the power of their own imaginations. To continue working in such an environment is both a privilege and a pleasure. The future is uncertain – as it is for all of us – but I hope I can keep doing this for many years to come.

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contemporary art

Ukraine