May 2005

Is it mentoring or mollycoddling? In the article Guiding their Time, Sandra Powley who heads the coaching and mentoring practice Triskell discusses mentoring in an interview with Artscene magazine editor Vic Allen.

Guiding their time

There are some things money can’t buy, suggests an exhibition in Leeds this month. So why is the state paying for it?

We heard a new word last month: Mentee. And new words (take ‘shock and awe’ for example) mean new trends. In Leeds’ Merrion Centre between May 5 and 11 is a group show by six artists called ‘Last Few Days’. It’s presented as a commentary on consumerism. Emma Bolland, for instance, likes to depict female flesh in overplush domestic decor (that’s her wallpaper at the top of the page). Pippa Hale prefers to mix her DIY with religion. Shelly Heath finds links between gender abuse and Belgian buns…

‘Last Few Days’, though, also concludes a year’s worth of training for the participants, who were selected for the D-cap (Demystifying Contemporary Arts Practise) course put together by East Street Arts. A key feature of the course was mentoring - the pairing-up of inexperience with experience that has become a fad in the UK’s post-educational visual arts world.

Fad isn’t a positive word. Maybe we should change it. Especially given that East Street Arts is one of the most ‘together’ and sensible arts organisations in the country.

East Street’s Karen Watson helped D-cap convenor Karen Babayan assemble the course: “It included a whole range of business skills, but what we didn’t want to do was neglect the art. Some of the artists came with really weak portfolios, it was obvious that they still needed some support.”

It was decided to match them up with successful artists who shared their individual working practices. As Karen says, ‘artists learn from artists’; and the practical value of older heads can be incalculable.

Ceramicist Maggie Barnes recently took on a mentee under a scheme run by Gargrave’s Chrysalis Arts. “When you’ve been doing things for a long time, it’s only when people start asking you questions that you realise, ‘I know about this!’.”

But why does it have to be paid for from the public purse? And do colleges now completely abjure the practical in arts training?

“It’s sometimes there,” said one of the ‘Last Few Days’ artists, Pippa Hale. “But students often choose not to go to those lectures.” “A lot of universities particularly fail to make the connection between art and business,” says Karen Watson. “On D-cap we didn’t want it to be one or the other. We wanted to bring it all together.”

Kirklees-based Sandra Powley has been an independent mentor for around eight years. She began by putting us right. “You mention the word ‘advice’; but a mentor doesn’t tell you HOW to do things. They look at what you want to do; at your motivation and performance issues. Sometimes it’s just about the ‘list of things you need to get around to’!

“Artists think it’s ‘happening’ when they push out the work and then don’t understand when they aren’t successful. They forget the marketing. It’s also about normalising some of the experiences when you work in isolation. When you get too close to something and you can’t think why anyone would want to see what you do.”

Artscene came across at least one regional agency mentoring scheme that simply gave an applicant £300 and told them to find their own mentor. How likely was it that a mentor would ever tell an artist they were - ooh...crap, or incompetent - if they were being paid to service them?

“That’s an issue about ethics,” says Sandra. “I would hope that if the mentors have had professional training then they would cover it. One of the things a mentor does is to hack down unrealistic goals into manageable chunks.”

So it’s not necessarily a failure if a mentor leads an artist to become a shelf-stacker in Tescos? “I guess the ultimate measure of success for a mentee is achieving the goals you arrive at during the mentoring process,” says Sandra. “They may not be the goals you started out with.”

Artscene still had to scratch a right-wing itch about artists getting mollycoddled with mentors, while the rest of us have to learn ‘the values of self-reliance’. But Sandra (an antipodean, who’s not an artist) says she’s had mentors through most of her career.

“Most of the major companies now have mentoring programmes; Marks and Spencers, for example. I believe the DTI is looking at mentoring schemes too. So NAAARH to you right-wing attitude!”

Ah professionalism. You can’t beat it. But Sandra is right about the isolation of visual artists. East Street Arts recently ran a national training day for artists on behalf of [a-n] magazine. It included a series of ‘one-to-one’ sessions with successful artists.

“They were all taken up in the first day,” says Karen Watson. “People wanted to travel to Leeds from Bristol and Brighton, just to spend 20 minutes talking to someone about their work”.

Of course this doesn’t preclude the idea that artists are still trying to find a sympathetic arts infrastructure, rather than engaging with the resentful mortals at the heart of the economic engine. But even if that is the case, mentoring - good mentoring - should put them right.

“It can bring changes that are quite profound and quick,” says Sandra.

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