Tag: art

I know all about art’s power to change lives

Author: | 17 Oct 2022

With so much turmoil in the world at the moment – anyone reading this will know prisons and the justice system are by no means immune- it is heartening some things are resilient enough to withstand external pressure. Art has the power to allow people to express themselves and be a key to transform lives.

So much so that one ex-scholar is keen to share the opportunity to exhibit from a seaside art gallery. 

Jamie Chapman writes below for Longford blog: 

I have been lucky to have people who have played a positive role in my life: the team in prison education when I was inside; Sister Carmen, the prison nun; Inside Time newspaper; those at the Koestler Trust who unlock the talent inside; and the Longford Trust and my Longford mentor Carolyn in supporting me through my fine art and professional studies degree at Bath Spa University.

Since I graduated in 2017, I’ve been working as an artist, selling my work (I exhibited at the 2016 Longford Lecture, alongside three other fine art student scholars) and enjoying life.

I didn’t go back to London where I grew up.  Too many bad memories. Instead I’ve stayed in Weston-super-Mare, next to the sea, where I did my art degree in a college that comes under Bath Spa’s umbrella.

I now live in a flat that looks out to sea, and in June this year had an exhibition of my landscapes and sculptures  – many using recycled materials – in the Granby Building in the town. The Mayor came to open it. (See picture above)

Some people say art is self-indulgent but I know all about its power to change lives, mine included.

It has built my confidence and, when I work with young people at a local rehabilitation unit, I see how art gives them a way forward, an outlet, a non-verbal way to say what they think and have been through when they can’t find the words. Instead they use a pencil and a paint brush.

Recently I lost one of the last surviving members of my family. Because of that I’ve reached a turning point. Life is too short so I want to show my thankfulness and a respect for the opportunities and love that I’ve been shown.  I know what makes me happy and that is to make others happy and help them take their lives forward.

I have therefore taken on the rent of the same space in the Granby Building in St Margaret’s Terrace where I had my exhibition. It’s a great space. I am calling it The Gallery and – between other jobs – I’ve been busy doing it up to professional standards.

It’s cost me a fortune, but greed for money caused me problems in the past, so no matter.  I don’t need that pressure in my life. Now it is almost ready and my plan in the months and hopefully years ahead is to run it as a not-for-profit gallery, renting it out at cost to other artists so they can show their work.

Giving them the keys is my way of spreading happiness, whether it be to students at the local art school, the groups of local photographers and artists I’ve got to know here, or to any past and present Longford Scholars who are reading this and who are artists with work to share.

 

If you are interested, get in touch.  You can find me on Instagram at TheGalleryWeston, or contact office@longfordtrust.org and we can connect you.

 

 

Isolation: an expert survivor’s guide

Author: | 20 Mar 2020

Isolation: an expert survivor’s guide by artist and former Longford scholar Lee Cutter

I know a bit about isolation. In fact, after three years in prison I am an expert.  Through this coronavirus crisis people keep asking me, ‘What’s it like in isolation? How do you cope?’ as they deal with anxiety and worry about separation from friends, colleagues and family. Everyone is searching for reassurance and tips to cope with curtailed freedom, albeit at home.

It’s got me thinking.

They say your first day in prison is the toughest. For me it came about six months into my sentence. The first day in a young offenders prison was certainly confusing and a struggle, my whole understanding of the world feeling flipped upside down, but I still had some freedom, as prison goes. This was because I was on remand, waiting for a judge to sentence me. I could work, attend classes in education, mix with others in prison – ‘associate’ as they call it inside, and go to the gym.

Just a few months on, I started to understand the environment, in an odd way, I felt part of a community. Then I was sent to Crown Court to receive my sentence. At that time, the now thankfully abolished indeterminate sentence was popular. It was a lottery whether I’d get one, carrying the real fear of never knowing when I might ever be free again. But my case was adjourned, pushed to another date. It was in the next, different young offenders prison where the pain of isolation really hit.

In limbo, I spent days and months on end in a single cell with only myself for company, locked up for 24 hours a day, with access to two phone calls and two showers a week. The prison was overcrowded, understaffed, and those under 18 were given priority to work and education. I was unlucky I was 18 years old. Though looking back, my mind felt a lot younger and I had never experienced anything like this before.

In the first few weeks I distracted myself with the television and the radio, anything to get a sense of a world beyond my four walls. During the day I’d talk with my next-door neighbour through the gap in the pipes at the end of the cell. It was at night I’d struggle with my thoughts. It’s an understatement to say the next few months were a challenge. I’d think, and think, and think. I’d think about the mistakes I had made, how they had affected people, I’d think about my family, the events that led to my situation. I wondered if it would be like this forever. It was sending me crazy. I knew I had to change, and that I’d need to teach myself how.

And then an unexpected opportunity presented itself – a pencil.

An officer had left a pencil in my cell by accident, I used it to write down my thoughts and feelings onto any scrap of paper I could gather. It took the negative thoughts out of my head, and by seeing them in front of me, it somehow helped me to understand where they might have come from, how I could change them. I began making drawings of my cell, I’d draw the sink, the bed, the window, anything in front of me. When I ran out of paper, I would draw into bars of standard prison issue soap. The soap was free on the wing and it was much more accessible than a piece of paper.

Funnily enough, I didn’t see myself as an artist, I found a creative side within me. I didn’t know anything about art, I don’t even think I liked art much at the time but I knew that making was helping me.

A few months later I was sentenced, avoiding the dreaded indeterminate sentence. This time I moved prisons again. In the new prison I had access to more arts materials, more time out of my cell. Officers and other inmates saw my drawings and soon started to give me photographs of their loved ones and pets to draw. They’d ‘pay’ me in toiletries and food. Looking back, I guess these were my first commissions.

It’s odd thinking back to those times. It feels like a different me then, and yet those times, and the isolation, have contributed to the person and the artist I am today. I’ve been out of prison for ten years now, have completed a BA degree in Fine Art, with support from the Longford Trust, got a postgraduate at the Royal Drawing School. I now have a much sought-after job with Koestler Arts – encouraging people in prisons and other secure settings to engage in the arts. I am proud to say I have achieved what many artists never manage, exhibiting in the prestigious Royal Academy, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Christie’s, the upmarket auction house and the Royal Festival Hall. And I am now a mentor for an artist through the Longford Trust who is studying a distance -learning degree in prison. I often think about what life is like for him being creative in his prison, I can see confinement shapes his work.

As we all face the isolation of coronavirus and restrictions in our daily lives and relationships I wouldn’t wish this uncertain period of confinement on anyone. One silver- lining is perhaps the insight it offers, a window into imprisonment. The lack of control, unable to go out when you feel like it, prevented from learning in a classroom or library when you choose, no longer seeing or hugging a grandparent –the punishing impact of not doing what used to be normal. I hope and trust we will all dig deep in this coronavirus, finding some hidden talents – as myself and my mentee have done with art. Spare a thought for the 80, 0000 plus men, women and children in overcrowded, often dirty prisons across England and Wales who know isolation and resourcefulness all too well. Next time someone says prison is too ‘soft’ remember this time and remind them what it felt like during the coronavirus crisis.

 

 

 

Find out more about Lee and his hand-made book An Inside Story, a hand bound with prison bedsheets and visitation shirts here: https://www.koestlerarts.org.uk/shop/books/an-inside-story/

 

 

From Prison Cell to The Walls of The Royal Academy of Arts

Author: | 10 Jun 2019

From Prison Cell to The Walls of The Royal Academy of Arts

For the Longford Blog, scholar Paul Grady reflects on his journey towards last year’s prestigious Summer Exhibition

Do you know where you were on Christmas Day, 2012? I do. I was in a prison in Somerset, many years into my sentence and still a few more to go.

 

Working on a distance learning art degree, I was looking for inspiration. Trying to come up with a project that would take me away from traditional prison art: pencil portraits from burn (tobacco), painting landscapes from photographs torn out of magazines, sculptures made from bread or matchstick models of boats and clocks. I have always been interested in the process of art and how it can be created in so many ways. Wanting this project to last a while, with New Year approaching, I thought it would be a good idea to create something over the whole year of 2013, from January 1st to 31st  December, to mark the passing of time. Almost as if I was crossing off the days.

 

With this seed of an idea, I had to decide how to get it onto paper and let it grow. How often would I sit down and draw? When, and for how long? If I was going to use this project as a way of marking off the days, then it stood to reason that it would have to be done every day of the year ahead. To work around my job in prison, I came up with the idea of drawing as soon as I woke up and let the inspiration flow from that first day. See where it took me.

 

The first day of January dutifully arrives, my alarm rudely awakens me from my slumber at six a.m. and I grab the board that I use for drawing, tape a large sheet of paper onto it and reach for a black ballpoint pen. Now what? Do something. Start. Make a mark. So that is exactly what I did, right in the middle of that huge piece of paper I drew a shape, a small circle that looked so lost on that expanse of whiteness. I drew more shapes around this circle slowly spreading outwards, I was starting to enjoy this. Let my hand flow, make marks that follow on from the last one, allow the drawing to grow organically. After an hour or so I wondered how to bring this first day of drawing to a close and allow me to begin again the next day? A membrane! Small circles around this shape, with larger circular globules within the membrane. I’m done and the door is about to be unlocked ready for me to face another day behind the highest prison walls in the country.

 

2nd January and the alarm screams at me to wake up. I grab the board from under my bed, put it on top of my still warm quilt and reach for my pen- blue today. Starting with a part of the membrane next to my first day’s drawing I figure out what shapes to put in the middle. These are totally random, allowing my hand to control the pen and make marks. When I feel it’s done I close off the membrane and wait for the sound of keys in the door.

Day three, the alarm trills and I’m up. A green pen waiting, ready to be used, the rules have become clear. The membrane stays the same, inside I can let myself be free and put any shape that feels right that morning, no colour will touch itself and the minimum colours I can do this with is four. Tomorrow I will use red. The next hour and a half rushes by and before I am finished, I hear the turn of the key in the lock before the bolt crashes back. I close this cell, as that is what each day’s drawing resembles, making up what, I do not yet know. What I do know, as I head down for breakfast, is that I want six a.m. to come around again.

 

The fourth day. I’m awake before the alarm. The board is on the bed before it sets off and I’m there, red pen in hand making marks. I begin to get a sense that something is happening to me, that I am ready to invest in this artwork like never before. As the prison door opens for the first time that morning, I’m putting the last few circles on the paper, my first series of four colours is complete. Bring on the rest of the month.

 

The last day of January is upon me and I must bring this drawing to an end. I have marked the passing of one whole month. In that month I have learnt that the prison I am in is going to close. I will be moving, it could happen with very little warning and I must be ready for it.

 

February arrives and I get a new sheet of paper, the only one to hand, a smaller piece of watercolour paper. Over the next few days the rules make themselves clear to me. It is during this month that I get two days’ notice that I am moving. The morning of the move I get up as usual at six and get to work on my drawing, the only thing that I haven’t packed and sent to reception. I am just about finished, the key turns the lock for the last time in that cell for me, I have to go and complete this somewhere else.

 

I have no job in the new jail and as a distance learner I have been told I must be locked in my cell for the core day. It means I now spend hours each day drawing tiny circles on a piece of paper. It is at this point that the title for this project makes itself known to me, ‘Twelve Months Hard Labour’, quite fitting don’t you think?

 

In the next ten months I’m on the move again, this time to an open prison. I experience my first day in years outside prison walls. I can prepare for a future where there will be no more keys heard early in the morning.

 

In the open prison I apply to university to study art. I use the twelve drawings as part of my portfolio at my interview, the tutors are very interested in the concept and process. I find myself explaining each drawing, why I chose the medium, the colours and the two different sizes of paper. I carried on using the smaller watercolour paper for all the months that were less than thirty-one days. All because it was the only decent sized piece of paper that I could find on the first day of February.

 

Fast forward to last Summer. Released, I have completed my university course and with the help of The Longford Trust as a Longford Scholar I have gained a First class degree in fine art. Not only that, my ‘January’ drawing from ‘Twelve Months Hard Labour’ has been entered into The Royal Academy Summer Show. It’s made it through the first round of judging. I take it down to London; everyone is excited. I don’t know why, it’s not as if it’s in the final cut yet.

 

I arrive at The Royal Academy to drop off my drawing and see how many people are there, as well as the television cameras. Maybe this is a big deal afterall.

 

A few weeks later I get the email, Congratulations. I got in! I’ve won my place in one of the biggest, most prestigious art shows in the world. Thousands will see my work. It’s real. My drawing, completed on a bed in a prison cell, will hang on the walls of The Royal Academy of Arts. I’m a full-on artist now.

 

You can see more of Paul’s work here: https://www.facebook.com/Pagartist70/