ART STUDIO TRASHED?

Post 6

Tuesday Morning I came to work to find the Education Manager looking very sad. She was heart broken that the art studio had been trashed over the weekend. There was an under 18’s party for 200 teens in the art center and the art studio had been used as a change room for the band and security. We couldn’t understand how over the over 18’s could be so childish. I offered to clean it up but the education manager wanted to leave the mess to show the director when he came in. Eventually a call came in from the weekend staff saying that the art studio had heaps of visitors on the Sunday, and they didn’t get a chance to follow up until the end of the day when they needed to close.

Yes, there was a mess with spilt glitter and wasted paper and materials in disarray, and Texas without lids – fortunately we didn’t have any paint out! Art works had fallen off the walls due to too little blu tac - not vandalism!

So the disappointment turned to glee knowing that the art studio had been in demand.

Turning concepts into reality was the biggest challenge, for example the director gave us the concept of creating ‘our world’, meaning that we would ask children to paint or draw images of how they see their world or how they would like their world to be in the future. These images would be cut out and glued to a huge globe over the next few months and would hang in the art studio. So, starting with the globe, it was decided to get a super large balloon and paper mache it. It took a few weeks to source and collect this balloon, then once at the center it didn’t fit through the door of the art studio. We let some air out to get it in, and then working on such a large scale the paper mache was so heavy that the balloon became deformed, and took ages to dry. More and more was added to it to try and get it round, and eventually the theatre manager did get to suspended it from the ceiling in the art studio.