With a year of foundation art studies under my belt, a healthy art folio and acceptance into both painting courses and the best jewellery design course around at the time - RMIT's Bachelor of Fine Art in Gold and Silversmithing - I was ready to launch into full time study for my first, real, creative career in the arts!
I was 34 years old, with a career as an advertising copywriter and executive behind me, as well as several years working in television as a production assistant. I had loved these careers very much, but eventually had to admit that I'd outgrown them.
Now I wanted to 'go inside' - to find out whether I actually had what it took to be that super creative person I very much hoped I was. I was beyond excited - and quietly terrified! There was always a chance I'd fall flat on my face. Now I had to walk the talk.
Everyone had warned me, when I left my prestigious advertising job at Saatchi and Saatchi Compton in Madrid, that I would NEVER survive the giddying pay drop from executive to student. Well, guess what? The more money I'd earned in advertising, the more I'd spent on designer-this and designer-that, on ski trips and trips to Paris and anything else that appealed to me at the time, so I had never really been ahead financially, even with my large salary. I was always at the limit of my smoking credit cards.
So dropping back to a student allowance didn't hurt so badly at all. Also, my mind was now focussed on learning rather than acquiring. Clothing was a no brainer: anything old would do, because I was going to get down and dirty with my hands-on creative career. As far as paying the rent, my student allowance covered the costs of living in a shared house, and I took on a part time job selling flowers at an all night florist's to accommodate any extra costs. (This was a fun job, as all kinds of people bought flowers in the middle of the night. I did, however, suffer terrible jet lag after the night shifts).
Student fees were deferred until after I had graduated and was earning enough money to pay them back. I was set to go!
My particular course accepted just 12 students a year - making us chosen ones feel quite exclusive. By contrast, the painting course accepted 50 students a year, at the time.
I was way older than most of my colleagues, most of whom were straight out of secondary school. I'm here to tell you that it didn't make any difference. What mattered was a shared passion for what we were learning, a good sense of humour, and a willingness to share our thoughts, our troubles, our disasters (there were many!) and our breakthroughs.
The first year was magnificent! I guess we were indulged by our teachers, being the new creative team that might eventually bring glory to that institution. We received praise for our efforts and daily encouragement to be daring and think out of the box, while methodically learning and mastering the basic skills required for gold and silversmithing.
Our first excursion to the specialty jewellery tool supply shops and the metal sellers was beyond exciting. It was a whole new world of wonderful tools and gadgets and textured materials and gauges! We had to purchase a whole range of tools - fabulous files, both heavy duty and exquisite "needle files", measuring devices, a fine jeweller's saw and blades of varying thicknesses, pliers of every shape and size, soldering materials, sanding paper, and a host of other bizarre, new things. I still remember the buzz of buying a shiny new toolbox at the city hardware and carefully placing my cherished tools into each hallowed compartment. The tools cost over $500 new, and I was fortunate that my mum pitched in to help, despite her misgivings about my chosen career. Mum couldn't understand why I had thrown away a good, high paying job, but was happy to have me back in Australia after my 9 year stint in Europe.
That first year I shone! I loved every second of the course! I loved the smell of the sulphuric acid which we used for dunking our silver and copper pieces in after soldering, thus removing the black oxidisation. I loved the sound of hammering on metal; I loved the heat and roar of the bunsen burners. I loved the furious sound of filing - something we became adept at very quickly.
Each of us was assigned our own work area with a peg on which to file, cut and support our pieces as we worked, a bunsen burner for soldering, and room for our books and files.
We were shown slides of the work of contemporary designers from around the world. We were sent to amazing exhibitions and retrospectives by top jewellery designers. Our own teachers - Carlier Makigowa, Robert Baines, Marian Hosking and Ray Stebbins - were themselves stars within the contemporary jewellery world. We participated in workshops by such luminaries as Susan Cohn, who worked wonders with anodised aluminium and titanium, and had recently been commissioned to make pieces for the famous Alessi design house.
We learned to solder, to rivet, to saw, to repousse, to shape and form, to draw metal down, and so many other techniques. Some of our classes didn't go so well...drawing and perspective was a challenge, the result of a teacher-class mismatch. This can happen in any teaching institution and is largely a matter of luck. You just have to do the best with what you're got and keep your eye on the big goals.
I was a clumsy student, and frequently would be stirred by the cry, "Margot, your hair's on fire again!" I had a tendency to forget about my hair in relation to the bunsen burner flame.
I've mentioned before that I believe mature age students, far from being disadvantaged, can achieve more than students who go straight from school to university, sometimes without really knowing much about the real world or what they want. Mature age students KNOW what they want. They go after it and they know that the clock is ticking and they have to suck up as much knowledge as they can. Their maturity means they often relate better to their teachers than the younger students - understand the asides and references to life experiences the younger kids just haven't had yet.
By the end of the first year, I was awarded top student of the course, and it had been a breeze! This was not to continue...
Second year was my reality check. It was a study year, I later found out, notorious for putting students to the test. No more Mr Nice Guy or Gal. The teachers pushed us endlessly, and criticised us when we got it wrong. Shoddy first year work no longer hacked it. We had to shape up or ship out. There were tears and dramas all the way through. This was certainly no longer creative kindergarten.
Living up to its reputation, second year was highly productive. We learned to make mokume gane, a Japanese technique involving the fusion in a kiln of 9 layers or so of silver and copper, with many variations. We learned to colour metals with chemicals, a fascinating process with its own quirks, so there were many surprises when we at last pulled our pieces out of the sawdust and saw the effects the chosen chemical mix had produced.
We learned sophisticated finishing techniques - polishing, burnishing, and even sandblasting to obtain an elegant matt finish. Like most things in life, each technique had its downside and upside, so decision-making was a key part of every process.
Research was a big part of our course, and we used the library for that. The internet was pretty much unheard of in Australia at the time. Mobile phones and email did not yet exist, so we used that old fashioned institution: the library.
How I loved the smell of the books, the hushed atmosphere, the dimmed lighting! How anybody could walk into a room overflowing with books of every shape, colour, subject and size, and not be awed and humbled by the wealth of knowledge presented to the eager mind, I do not know. The feel of a heavy, well-dog-eared book is something the internet cannot yet duplicate... Libraries are hallowed spaces, a contrast to the pressures and roar of the outside world.
We had a very stringent art history teacher, who made us memorise hundreds of art slides - the names of the artists and the dates. I never saw the point in this, but was too scared of our no-nonsense teacher to rebel. In the end, I became expert at identifying each period of art, and soon felt more confident for it. Somehow there was method in this madness. Years later I discovered that this austere, multi-talented teacher had a fabulous sense of humour...only it clearly wasn't wasted on 2nd year students.
I am forgetting, of course, the essays. These were the bane of most students' lives. Many of the students were by nature highly visual, and crafting together a well-researched, well-written essay was a horrifying task, seemingly beyond their capabilities. I was fortunate to have always adored and handled English with ease, having an innate love of words and poetry, so essays were not a challenge to me. This said, pride goes before a fall! In my third year, I managed to completely miss the point of an essay on post-modernism, something I am embarrassed about to this day, and I received a fittingly low result for my tragic efforts.
There were supplementary classes to be taken throughout the degree course that had nothing to do with jewellery design. I took painting as an elective, and while I loved the act of painting, I received virtually no tuition. Unless you were a mainstream painter, the lecturers didn't appear to take you seriously - at least while I was there. I had fun with my paintings, but completed most of them without guidance and simply submitted them for a bland mark at the end of each year. Some of the other elective classes were known to be good, in contrast. Printmaking students were turning out some fabulous work, and had learned many skills in tandem with jewellery making.
One of my additional classes involved giving a talk to a group of students, and I chose to discuss the metaphysical and supernatural events I had experienced over the years. Without going into too much detail here (this is a whole chapter unto itself!), at the end of my talk I opened up the class to questions and was astounded by the number of extra terrestrial sightings and out of body experiences that had occurred to people just like you and me. Believe me, there's some wild stuff out there. Absolutely fascinating!
While second year was a tough year, I created some of my finest pieces. By year's end, when we were finishing everything up ready for evaluation, I was feeling stressed but confident. In the week preceding evaluation I worked around the clock, missing sleep three nights in a row, trying to tidy drawing folios and finish pieces that were not quite ready, requiring more fine sanding or cleaning up of solder stains. There were student journals to write up and hand in. These were supposed to contain progressive drawings of our pieces, from conception to completion, but most people made the pieces first and filled in the drawings later, working backwards, in effect. This was certainly the case for me. I was notoriously untidy and disorganised, usually scribbling my ideas on any scrap of paper I could find, including old grocery receipts and the back of tickets. Needless to say, this gave me grief when it came to present my journal. It's something I might approach differently if I could do it all over again.
Life intervenes when you least expect it to. On the last school day before end-of-year presentation of our work for evaluation, I received an urgent call to go to the hospital. Leaving my pieces in disarray on my desk, I dashed out of the room and took a taxi to the hospital. My mother had almost died, an indirect consequence of the suffering she was enduring as a result of both Parkinson's Disease and a stroke that left her dizzy and nauseous most of the time. My darling mum had wanted to check out of the world, but had not quite managed it.
My own world ground to a halt. When faced with the possible loss of a loved one, things fall sharply into perspective. I held mum's hand as she lay in the hospital bed, fighting to gain consciousness. When she came to, a single tear rolled down her cheek. "I'm so ashamed," she said - and in that moment, broke my heart. My darling mother had suffered for so long, and who was I to judge her actions? The last thing she deserved was to feel shame. She deserved to feel love, to know how loved she was, and I wondered if I had not done enough to help her be happy, to keep her thoughts focussed on this world. And yet...had she not abandoned me by her actions? Did that meant she didn't love me enough?
These are questions I will never know the answers to, and I feel a painful mixture of guilt and abandonment when I relive that time. But the important thing is that mum pulled through and quickly received some fabulous repatriation care. She regained some of the strength that had dwindled with the Parkinson's, and the years immediately following seemed to bring her, once more, some quality of life. Life goes on, of course.
Although I never did get to make those last important finishes to my jewellery pieces, I graduated from second year and was about to become one of the elite: a third and final year student!
Third year was unlike any of the preceding years. Now, we were given the freedom and luxury of time to create a cohesive body of work, drawing on all the skills of the previous two years. We were helped to learn new skills that were necessary for our individual visions. We were treated with more respect, somehow, and that, in turn, gave us more self respect and spurred us on to greater things.
I remember how in my job as an advertising executive in Spain, my boss, a North American, seemed to see something special in me. Quickly, he made it known, both personally and publicly, that he treasured my contribution to the agency. His faith in me had a powerful effect! I blossomed, became more confident, and morphed into the excellent executive he thought I was. I gave 110 per cent and was proud of the work I was doing. This situation later repeated itself when I worked as a writer for a mining company. The more skilled they believed I was, the more skilled I became - a win-win situation!
If there is any way to help a person in life, it is to honour them with respect and confidence in their abilities. Always speak to their highest part of them. There's a good chance they'll step up to the mark and surprise even themselves...
In my third year I fell in love with an industrial metal called monel, now widely used in the jewellery world. I found its deep grey colouring provided a wonderful contrast when combined with gold, and I used it to create bowls, bracelets and rings. Some of this work was photographed in a well known jewellery design magazine, and I was pretty proud of that. I also worked in silver, and my pieces were minimalist and clunky. I later sold, traded or gave away these rings, and to this day regret I didn't keep them. They are my lost children!
Learning to give away your creative children is a real and necessary part of a creative career.
Third year brought with it a major end-of-year award, presented to me by the state's Minister for the Arts at a sophisticated end of year exhibition held in the foyer of a major Melbourne bank. For once, I'd left my hole-filled, stained t-shirts behind. I wore a black designer suit, with black tights and high heels, in my ears, a pair of Georgian mourning earrings made from gold and woven human hair. I had found these at an antique fair years before, and they continue to be a prized possession - although I've often been tempted to sell them when times were tough...
The only thing marring the night was a falling out with my on-again, off-again boyfriend. That night was definitely "off" - but I had so many good things happening that I refused to dwell on it.
Now I was an award winning Gold and Silversmithing Graduate! The world was my oyster. But what was I to do now, exactly? How was I to earn a living, with a student debt hanging over my head and no experience of my newly forged creative career in the real world?
What was to come, was not at all what I expected...
Create like the wind!
Margot Wiburd
p.s. Fast forward to the future: Visit my website at http://www.margotwiburd.com
No comments:
Post a Comment