Project News

All the latest news from the project...

End of an era for us
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 18-05-2007 21:10
Things came to an end for us at Papdale on Tuesday 15th May. Although we have packed up our Papdale studio so that it no longer looks like an artists' studio, we have been invited to run consequence workshops and will be having a little "Your Gallery" event as part of the school's Fun Day this Saturday (19th). Of course its always a bit of an anti-climax when an era of your lives come to an end, but we do still have the St.Magnus Festival open day and concert to prepare for and several exhbitions which are planned for this year to work towards. We are planning to spend the coming week sorting things out in our Stromness studio but we also have several potential jobs and offers of work to consider.

I’m pasting a copy of the new statement that I have just put on our pages of the Axis website:

We also had a short news feature made about us which was shown last week and is now archived on STV television (North Tonight features):

Christil Trumpet on STV (WMV file)

And our latest article on the HI~Arts/Northings online journal can be found:

Northings - May 2007

And here is our new artists' statement:

Christil Trumpet was formed in 2003 and is an artistic collaborative. Our Collaborative title is a shortened anagram made from our own two names - Matilda Tumim and Christopher Prendergast. Making art together is a natural extension of our shared life. For us, collaboration is a symbiotic process and it is our common intention to provoke thoughts about the nature of beauty through our artwork.

We have just completed a one year post as Artists in Residence at Papdale Primary School in Orkney - a post which was funded by the Scottish Arts council and the Orkney Islands Council. As part of this Residency we were commissioned to create art works for the school in collaboration with children. We created eight large paintings for the octagonal light well in the schools foyer. These paintings, "Consequence", were inspired by the drawn outcomes of games of consequences played during workshops.

Our own work surfaced more towards the end of the residency, when the childrens drawings began to influence us in different ways. The themes which motivate us consistantly have been rites of passage, roots and identity and concepts of family life and these themes have resurfaced alonside new sources of inspiration. We are currently working on a series of vertical triptychs which have been inspired by fantasy plant drawings that some of the younger children created for us during a game of Consequences on that theme (starting with the roots and building up to the flower).

We are now resettling ourselves back into our Stromness studio where we will be digesting the impact that working with so many children has made on our creative output. Spending twelve months working full time in a large primary school has been an amazing experience and we have had a wonderful and highly creative year at Papdale Primary School.

Many of the Consequence images and doodles of children, staff, friends and family have also inspired our own work and the painting, "Rik & Centaur Woman" is one recent example of this. The background for this painting was made using acrylic paint and was a response to a friend's doodle which we superimposed with his chosen consequence character.

We sometimes work with children on the autistic spectrum and have been interested and inspired by the drawings of those who deem themselves to be less able artistically. In our artworks we wish to elevate the status of the scribble and are fascinated by doodles and work that is made as an aside. When people doodle they are largely focusing on what they are hearing or saying and the doodle is often a very good indicator of their actual state of mind, because it has emerged from a stream of consciousness. The doodle drawing is usually considered to be a throw away object and that is precisely what excites us about it.

A Year of Consequence
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 10-04-2007 20:26
This preface has been written by Pam Beasant to go inside our new folder and card catalogue;

"Christil Trumpet, as the name somehow beautifully expresses,
is not just a collaboration, it’s more a collision and explosion
of creativity, fuelled by the skill and passion of the artists.
Matilda Tumim and Christopher Prendergast (whose names
are a loose anagram for their alter ego) have done that difficult
thing: translated their partnership into their work and
transformed it.

"To call this an exciting collaboration is to understate it.
These two artists are making something new, pushing and
questioning each other, and going to a place where what
they have made seems almost inexplicably wonderful. During
their year-long residency at Papdale Primary School, they
have inspired the children through games of consequences
and art workshops, to see how the good and bad monsters
of the imagination can be validated, even celebrated. It’s a
deceptively simple idea – enormous fun for the children, with
an underlying seriousness of artistic purpose. And the huge,
beautifully-painted canvases, achieved by the best of
collaborative efforts, will be a permanent legacy.
Games of consequences are by their nature unexpected.
For Christil Trumpet, however, it can only be upward
and onward. Whatever they do next, a new generation
of art lovers will be open to the ideas generated by this
deliciously surprising work."

Pam Beasant
George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow

Photo: Alistair Peebles

The final weeks
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 25-03-2007 10:41
Last week P2 came in for workshops. The week before that we gave a presentation to the Papdale staff and we have been having loads of visitors. Gradually though we making a psychological and physical shift back to our Outertown studio. Our own work still owes a great deal to the school children’s creative energy but it is also taking on more adult themes again now and we are growing impatient to spend as much time as possible working on new paintings/ projects and talking through our ideas. It is less a case of consolidating existing ideas and more a case of gathering up lose strands and taking them on to the next stage.

The P2 workshops produced a body of Consequence drawings that could provide us with tons of creative fodder for the year ahead. We told all the groups of young children a little about the Orcadian poet and naturalist Robert Rendall and his discovery of the rare flower, Cardamine Prentensis Lynn, on the marshy land left over from a pond where Papdale primary School now stands. The “Duckie”, as it was known, was used for recreational purposes by Kirkwallians in the nineteenth Century. By the time Robert Rendall found this plant the Duckie had ceased to be a proper pond and the wetland that remained was a fertile ground for wild flowers and insects.

Armed with folded pieces of paper the P2 ‘ducklings’ started their Consequence game by drawing the roots of a plant. For reference the children were able to make up or draw from actual plants (we had some gardening books and hand picked wild flowers for them to take inspiration from). Each child then passed their folded root drawing onto their neighbour and the stalk and flower were drawn. Before unfolding the finished drawing we asked each child to name the flower/ plant.

The resulting drawings are colourful vital and intriguing. Some of the humour of the game has inevitably been lost because a burlesque character is more amusing to behold than a strange plant, but there were still many smiles and expressions of delight when each drawing was revealed.

We have painted two small vertical flower triptychs “Lorna Roze” and “Louise Flower”. We had a young woman called Louise into help us on the first day of these workshops. We felt that this work experience might be useful in her application to art college. Her contributions to the Consequence game brought a new dimension to the drawings and in ‘Louise Flower” the young child’s root and stalk bloom into a huge colourful flower full of youthful sophistication.

We hung the five mini beast paintings, titled “Bite Fly”, above the rectangular archway in the corridor yesterday. There is a window above them but not much light on them, but as the colours are luminous it does not seem to matter unduly. We felt like anarchic graffiti artists going into the school on a Saturday with a tool kit and ladder and adding an artwork that no one is really expecting (although we have got permission from senior management - we are law abiding really!. It will be interesting to see if we get a reaction tomorrow morning - especially at lunchtime when the entire school walks underneath “Bite Fly”.

P1 are coming in this week - our last year group of the residency. We are going to ask them to illuminate letters which we will use to add the titles of the big Consequence paintings. The titles come from the names children gave their Consequence characters before they were unfurled, names such as “Mr Scar & Mr Malink”. The theme for the illumination of these letters will also be the ‘Duckie’ and we will focus on marsh and pond life. We will then turn them into painted name signs which will go up underneath the paintings in time for the launch of Consequence in June. This seems to be a productive way of consolidating the year’s work with the school children - ending up with the school’s youngest year group (apart from pre school) making this important contribution to a residency that started with the older ones playing the Consequence game. Hopefully it will also help the P1s to have a relationship with these eight paintings in year’s to come. Then of course there are still the drawings on tags to be done in preparation for the Pupil’s Wave which will be assembled back in our Outertown studio when the builders are ready for us to construct it.

Including the imminent Easter holidays we only have six weeks left at Papdale now. Between the official St. Magnus festival launch of Consequence and the exhibition of our own residency work at the Pier Arts Centre in September, timed to be part of the Science Festival, we will still be pretty busy throughout 2007 on residency related work. Of course there are many other things brewing and being planned in the Christil Trumpet background - so watch this space!

Fantasy Mini Beasts
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 20-02-2007 12:29
2007 is proving to be no less frantic and exciting than 2006 was for Christil Trumpet. We are slowly but surely adapting to life as full time collaborative partners. It’s great to know that an artistic dilemma can be resolved by the two of us, face to face, as and when it arises.

We have just finished five canvases which will be placed in a row, each flush with the next, each painting being two foot by eighteen inches in dimension. These paintings will then be permanently installed above the arch next to the music room. The paintings have been inspired by a group of fantasy mini beast drawings that were created by last year’s primary twos during our workshops. We have been looking at books and catalogues with the children during workshops and the styles of artists like Patrick Cauldfield, Jeff Koons and Gary Hume can clearly be seen in these paintings.

A friend came by yesterday and exclaimed “Yes! At last Christil Trumpet is making art about art!” We did get a slight shock when we stood back from the row of five paintings once they were complete. These paintings represent a strange and exciting departure for us because we started this project considering it to be child-led and yet it has culminated in a more sophisticated, artist led work than any of the large Consequence paintings. The bright colours and freestyle paint work and references in “MIni Beasts” have served to make this horizontal strip a breakthrough for us in artistic terms. It might take us a while to digest the implications of this way of working on our future collaborative approach to new projects. None of these canvases were highly planned - we each selected a P2 drawing and went our own way with it independently of what the other was doing. Towards the end of this unstructured process we took a look at each of the five canvases and discussed ways in which we might make them connect a little to the other. Each canvas/panel was created on its own and then all five were hung side by side to make a single piece. I think this way of working has suited us well. It brings with it the same random and unpredictable qualities that a game of Consequences has and this artwork has brought many of the more interesting aspects of collaboration to the fore.

Photo: Alistair Peebles

Winter blues (pixilated)
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 26-01-2007 14:30
I’ve just been down to the post office to send off a submission for a London art prize. The unusual thing about this prize is that it is intended to encourage an ‘innovative approach to painting’ and the image goes online for a public vote if it gets through the initial selection process. We don’t normally go in for art competitions for the simple reason that they involve al lot of work and often incur haulage costs, insurance etc. We learnt of this particular one through the opportunities section of the Axis web site (a web site for contemporary visual arts practitioners). It seemed that this prize was worth going for because it would provide us with the chance to pursue an aspect of the Consequence project that we had not yet explored much.

So while Chris put the finishing touches to the last of our big Papdale Consequence paintings, I went to work with oil paint on canvas exploring a rather scrappy consequence drawing that had came out of a family game we played a year ago . The felt tip drawing had been titled “Centaur Woman” by my mum and enlarging her very particular handwriting in green oil paint at the bottom of the painting was a strange experience. This analytical or investigative approach to painting appeals to me very much - it is copying in one sense - but when I’m painting I feel like I’m a forensic scientist giving a detailed examination of a potentially vital piece of information that would normally have been discarded. As I paint the shadow in a fold or the slight indentation in the top corner of a paper crease or the inky blot on the strange breast that one of my boys has drawn with his new calligraphy pen, I find myself mesmerised by the beauty of something apparently so ordinary. The fragility of paper, the colours that make up a white surface, the vulnerability and humanity in a felt tip mark all take on a reality that is hard to describe in words. The end result may be quite photographic but there is something about exploring an apparently ordinary object that is unique to painting - it is as if, while painting, I’m caressing and dignifying or even accentuating the humanity of each mark, object or shadow.

Happy New Year!
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 12-01-2007 22:04
School started again on Monday 8th January.

We have been been away for the whole Christmas and New Year period in Crieff and Edinburgh.

It’s been a pivotal week for us. This quote from an article that Alistair Peebles wrote about us for the hi~arts journal Northings at the start of our residency at Papdale seems particularly relevant at the moment.

"The school clearly sees a benefit in there being two of them (Christil Trumpet) working together, but I wondered how they themselves felt about that. Was it an advantage?"

“Definitely. It helps stop us wasting time, since we sort of rein each other in if ideas start to get too far off course. We can talk through issues and worries and that helps maintain perspective. And it doubles the input as far as the children are concerned.

“But more than that, in many ways, although we began working collaboratively as Christil Trumpet four years ago, we are still in the early stages of developing the idea. This residency is a really great opportunity for us to discover the potential for us working together, and to find new and interesting ways for us to work as individual artists too.”

When we first had the idea to work with the Consequence game over a year ago we felt a little as I imagine the writer Philip Pullman felt when he first created his "Daemons”. The game then bore fruit during our first term at Papdale. But every now and then the doubts creep in - usually to be dispelled by hard work and the sheer delight we both feel at being paid to be artists for a year - and by the novelty of having so many more visitors and collaborators than we are used to, most of whom are excited about our work.

Like doctors or teachers or any professionals it is very important to keep our work practice up to date, and that can be hard if you live and work in Orkney - especially when the Pier Arts Centre has been shut for two years. It is possible to maintain knowledge and awareness of what is going on in contemporary art whilst living in Orkney, although I think that we probably do so in a different way to artists who are based in a city. Of course we can’t just hop on a bus or train and go and see the exhibition that everyone is talking about. There are no hoardings or giant plasma screens, nor indeed is there much public art at all here in Orkney. There are no poems to read on the underground on your way to work or posters in tunnels advertising the latest art fair. But when we do go away, even infrequently, the intensity with which we absorb just about every thing we set eyes on is astonishing.

For example on our last morning in Edinburgh we found that we had an hour to dash to the Gallery of Modern Art where we soaked up Jim Lambie’s mattress covered in colourful buttons and his psychedelic floor. Our eyes and minds feasted on the work of Mona Hatoum, Christine Borland, Martin Creed, Douglas Gordon and many other of our contemporaries. We dragged our kids out of their Christmas “we want ..” mantra, so that they were forced to walk grudgingly around all this art with determined “we don’t do art” expressions on their faces. But they did look as we passed from room to room, despite themselves, and their eyes sparkled as they whispered rude things to each other about their impossibly arty parents. Martin Creed’s 1000 balls went down well with our two youngest sons because it was interactive and they were allowed to push and squeeze huge 6 foot balls and tiny ones and giggle over the fact that this was described as art at all.

With a deadline for a painting looming we have been focused all week on getting something underway. A friend came in on Tuesday to lend us a book by Al Gore ‘An inconvenient truth’ that he thinks might inspire us to work with an environmental theme. We gazed in awe at Arial images of hurricane Katrina. We briefly considered using this image and went through the question and answer routine that is the prelude to a new project. The writer Kathleen Jamie was on radio 4 today saying that it takes her three years of thinking and learning about a subject before she feels confident enough to write about it.

This week has been important for us because it has taken us right back to where we started, to the concept behind “Consequence” and to the reasons behind us forming Christil Trumpet. The big “Consequence” paintings have never worried us in the way that some of the smaller work has done because their origins clearly lie in the drawings from which they came. They have also taken on a pantomime/ burlesque quality and there is an element of danger to them - they are not just pretty faces. The elements in them that are dark or disconcerting have come from the group of children who played the game and were able to sneak in subversive images. That is the beauty of this game. If challenged we can always just say “ah but that inappropriate looking character came from the kids themselves you see ..so we have just interpreted these things!” These eight foot paintings are almost complete now. The latest four will be hung in between the first four in the front lobby of the school next month.

During our first term a visiting artist friend asked us how true we were going to remain to the original Consequence concept but we were unable to give him an answer. We knew it was the big question that our year at Papdale would be spent addressing but when we looked at the hundreds of drawings on our studio wall - surreal characters of infinite variety and complexity, we were torn and we knew that we would have to pursue many avenues before we could make up our minds which path the Consequence game was going to take us on.

The original consequence games were interesting as the characters were seen within the context of the game. When we had hundreds of characters some of them were so powerful they seemed to walk away from their origins and move into a different world as independent surreal characters. The question we have had to consider is do we let this happen, is it a natural and interesting development. The game, however, is about collaboration and what can happen when people take a creative risk. We have decided to persue both avenues and Matilda is working as I write on a detailed photo real painting of a consequence drawing made by our family, which emphasises the immediacy of the game, the thrill of a powerful image created in a couple of minutes on a grubby piece of paper. I hear a voice “why paint it ?". Because by painting it we encourage you to examine the beauty in ordinariness and it is like placing the drawing under a microscope and shouting out ‘hey come and look at this its amazing’. If you have not seen it this links to our statement about the work we made with beach rubbish which was called “Foul Flora Weird Waves’.

This week we arrived back to work with a gnawing sense of uncertainty . We both have our own visions, separate histories and different skills and the things we love about art making and are not often the same. For instance Matilda remembered this week that she has a passion for detail, exploring the light and shadows in between things. She loves to examine and investigate surfaces and textures - like a forensic scientist might. I on the other hand am looking for a way to visualise some crazy idea I have had. Where she loves the super real I love the surreal and I need to know that there is content in each art work. I want to create visually in as poetic a way as possible. My approach is romantic and can be chaotic, hers is investigative and functional. I guess it’s this borrowing from each other that makes it work.

Notes from two collabrative artists in a big primary school
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 15-12-2006 10:14
Betty (a school cleaner and new friend) has had her work cut out for her this week, what with seventy primary fives (nine year olds) and a lad doing his work experience with Christil Trumpet (can you imagine doing your work experience for school with a pair of unruly artists like us ?). The mess left behind from the cutting and sculpting of many labels and tags has been tremendous. We’ve decorated our ‘Christilmas Trumpety’ tree using these labels (this name was made up on the spot and has a nonsense poem, Edward Lear feel to it that my dad would have loved). The long term plan for these cut out labels is for them all to provide froth and energy for the Pupils’ Wave, but in the meantime they have made excellent decorations for our studio tree. The paper residue has been scattered in tiny bits all over our dark carpet every morning this week for Betty to hoover up for us and we must have got through several hundred labels.

All eight workshops went well and we managed to keep each one sufficiently different to keep ourselves alert and happy as well. The quiet groups seemed to turn us into a double comedy act whereas the noisy ones had us behaving in a calmer, more subdued way but we got lots of our art books and catalogues out for all the workshops and the kids seemed to enjoy pouring over the works of Picasso, Miro, Rothko, Goldsworthy, Friedman, Gormley, Stella, Guston and many others to get ideas for their own paper cut outs. We talked a lot about Picasso’s development from child prodigy to artist and how he spent a lot of his working life trying to capture the simplicity of a child's drawing style that he had never posessed himself. The work experience student found this intriguing because until this week he had entirely dismissed Picasso as someone who’d been quite good in his early ‘Blue’ days but who had gone rapidly down hill from Cubism onwards. We looked at balls made of melted down action men's torsos and huge 3d stars made out of toothpicks. We used Rothko to talk about abstraction and Stella to discuss wall sculpture and Alan Davie to philosophise about areal views and our fears of flying. We showed them Philip Guston’s paintings when they got caught up in 'neat versus scribbly' debate.

Chris is now studying the digital images I took of the workshops and the tree and he says that many of the close ups of the children’s artworks hanging on the tree have a Mexican Day of the Dead quality, but we can also see how inspired these children were by the artists whose work they were looking at. In several of the workshops the children asked Chris to tell them a story and he told them about the American Artist Jeff Koons who went from stockbroking to art and we showed them his giant toys, puppies made of flowers, huge photo realist paintings of giant breakfast cereals in milk. Chris explained how some artists do not even make their own work but have a workshop full of technical assistants, “Boy - but that’s just lazy” one boy commented while I assisted him by cutting out his drawing while he langorously turned the page of an art book!

Today, Friday, once Betty is done we will be alone again to paint our paintings and gather our thoughts together. There hasn’t been much time for thinking or painting this week. Yesterday another group of art students from the Orkney College arrived unexpectedly during a workshop and earlier in the week we had several visiting teachers who joined in with the workshops. Kenny Pirrie, a photographer from the Orcadian, arrived half way through an afternoon session to take photos of children and the tree for a feature this week on us for the local newspaper.

Now we can squabble again in privacy without anyone to look on in amusement or horror, or a mixture of both. The ‘Christilmas Trumpety tree ‘is so covered in white creative wonders it looks as though it has snowed hard in our tardis - although outside our studio all is just wind and rain! We still have piles of promotional cards to send out today before the Christmas post 2nd class stamp deadline is up. The seventh of the 8 foot Consequence paintings is almost complete and next week we shall start working on the last one - and we collaborators have not even argued once since the day began!

Thoughts about the week ahead:
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 11-12-2006 14:50
Learning to blog over the last week has not exactly changed my life but it has heightened my awareness about all sorts of small but creatively important aspects of our one year post here. There is also the additional bonus that by keeping these blogs regularly updated I’m satisfying the part of our brief that is about evaluation too.

Today we have a 15 year old boy who is here for the week as part of his work experience for his Social and Vocational qualification. He is quiet and seems to be a very nice, tallented lad but even so his presence in our studio is unnerving to us and I think it is going to make us value the short time we have left to work alone together more than ever once the week is over. For instance right now we would usually be sitting having a post lunch exchange of observations on school life and we might just be engaged in general post weekend chat on a Monday afternoon while painting - but sooner or later our conversation would usually stray away from gossip and move onto a work related matter. Neither of us bat an eyelid about the lateral, stream of consciousness way that our conversations and ideas will unravel - that’s just how Christil Trumpet works - we wander from tatties for tea to phillosophy to politics and then sudenly that will bring with it an idea for a future project.

We are unable to do that this week because we cannot just say the first thing that comes into our heads in front of a 15 year old school boy who we hardly know. This is not only because the content of our ramblings might be inappropriate for the ears of this young man but because we can only ramble creatively in the privacy of our studio when we are entirely alone. Because we have children of our own we only get to be entirely alone when we are in our studio.

In addition to our 15 year old work experience boy we have the Primary Five year group coming in for workshops for the next three days. I admit that because of all the presence of these additional collaborators I am not expecting that this will be a good week for private creative exploration Christil Trumpet style - but of course I could be wrong - wider collaboration can sometimes lead us on unexpected and creatively rewarding journeys.

We will be working with the P5s on the Pupil’s Wave project and this year group will be using scissors to turn their labels into small paper sculptures that should eventually form the froth of the wave. We will also be talking to the school children about the Consequence project and showing them examples of contemporary art collections and some huge exhibitions spaces such as the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern as well as some tiny spaces such as the Peedie Gallery (The gallery in a shoe box). Both the Pupil's Wave and the focus on paper sculpture should also dovetail quite well with the P5 special topics of light and sound and the environment that they are studying this term.

Hot tip for the week; these hand sculpted luggage labels and shop tags would also be a cheap and simple way make homemade Christmas decorations – Christil Trumpet turns Blue Peter?

Students these days
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 09-12-2006 10:24
Yesterday morning was always going to be busy but when our youngest was sick first thing we both knew that it meant would have to spread ourseselves thin. In the end I went to work and Chris stayed home with our sick child - partly because he is more robust about vomit than I am and partly because the first meeting to discuss the creation of a constituted visual artists group was more my department. The meeting went by so fast that the four of us barely had time to breath. Then Carol Dunbar and six HNC art students from the Orkney College arrived to visit our studio. They seemed a nice enough bunch but they didn’t look like art students looked like in my day.

For me the equvilant of this year that they are doing at the Orkney College would have been my foundation year at Chelsea School of Art. This was the year before I met Chris and it was amazing. To go from the confines of Art A level at school to the relative anarchy of Chelsea was liberating in the extreme. The additional knowledge that this world I was entering was despised by my mum just added piquancy to it all. The Bagley’s lane department, which housed the Chelsea painiting M.A and the foundation course was sited in an old Victorian primary school down at the Fulham end of the King’s Road. This was in the early eighties, pre yiuppy developments and there were many factories and run down Victorian terraces and a bohemian, industrial feeling to that area still. The tutors all mooched about in jeans and old jumpers and art school blue faded linen jackets with roll ups permemantly glued to their bottom lips and a mop of oil painty, greasy hair on each of their heads. There were cliques and sub cliques and people that got invited for a week to the Isle of Man with one of the painting tutors and people who didn’t because they weren’t REAL painters. I moved from group to group, design table to scupture workshop, life room to fashion studio, pub to pub, rellishing every smell and savouring the idea of each discipline - in ammongst the roll ups and the diverse social whirtwind.

There was a life room covered in seedy swatches of cloth and reeking of old cigars and booze because the life room tutor was of the Camberwell mould. The life model, a Spannish woman, would walk around gossiping loudly in a permanant state of near undress. It was all so exciting that I spent my year in a state of euphoria. I would set off from my parents’ house in Hammersmith every morning on my Coventry Eagle bike with my portfolio tied on the back with old string and my bondage trousers (for the first part of the year I was a punk until I decided that it wasn’t the right look for the high minded artist that I wanted to be) strapped up also to avoid cycling mishaps. At least six of my mates there were Scottish and had left home to do this foundation course and several were living in rented accommodation near me and we would meet up at greasy cafes during the weekends and do pub crawls in the evenings. Then there were the ones who squated. Looking back I’m not sure whether they did this out of necessity or because it was so cool but the sight of a crowbar being brandished and heads nodding with complicity was not unusual in the Chelsea canteen. I met some wonderful people that year and it marked the huge gulf between school and art school brilliantly.

I wonder if this is how things are when you leave an Orkney Secondary and go to the Orkney College? I suspect it’s not but I may well be wrong. I do hope I am wrong because that first taste of an anarchic world was really important for me. That foundation year at Chelsea fired my imagination and taught me that if you want something badly you have to be resourceful and aquire the skills you need through self relliance - a good crowbar probably still helps too.

Notes from a small artist in a big primary school
Posted by Christil Trumpet on 07-12-2006 10:27
When we get into our Papdale studio (by 8.30 am on a good day) the cleaner, Betty is always here. We can see her through the window as we walk from the school building over to our cabin studio. She is usually looking at one of the paintings or drawings and having a blether with it as often as not – her bike propped up against the studio wall. In lots of ways she keeps us right – she’ll remember that one of our boys has football training or a parent’s evening and she’s a tonic most mornings. She thinks we are too clean and tidy –the school janitor warned her that artists would be hellishly messy and she was expecting the worst. We’ve deliberately set out to confound these expectations and anyway oil paint is too expensive to spread about in places where it’s not wanted. Sometimes she dashes off on her bike and comes back with a pint of milk so we can start the school day with a cuppa or she’ll offer to post a letter to save us time. It all serves to remind us both how much we are enjoying being here at Papdale – communicating with each other and Betty and being greeted by the staff of a busy school every morning rather than facing the prospect of a day making art without the other half of a collaborative partnership, who is off earning a living care working somewhere. Every now and then we take stock and remember to remember that we only have another five and a half months here and then we’ll be back to the real but not so real world that is ours.

Below: The introductory letter from Christil Trumpet, given to each pupil at Papdale Primary School at the start of the residency.