'The ideal sink is there where you need it, in the workshop
room or in an anteroom ...'
Bridget McKenzie
Artworks Assessor
The vision
'Creative spaces' are about the experience of learning. They are dedicated spaces in schools, galleries and museums where people of all ages can explore the visual arts by seeing, enjoying and making art, and by talking about and being challenged by art.
In the context of galleries and museums, this Project assumes that learning is a process that pervades and enlivens the venue as a whole.
For example, a gallery or museum should be able to:
- engage its visitors and invite their active participation
- embrace different learning styles and levels of interest and capability
- make learning an integral part, rather than an adjunct, of the gallery or museum and of every activity, from collecting to display and from programming to promotion
An education or learning centre should be a manifestation of this philosophy; and the learning activities should not be separate from the galleries, but a means of enriching and extending the displays and of generating new ones.
Similarly, the arts in schools have relevance and resonance throughout the school, being valuable in themselves and in informing and enhancing other disciplines, as well as meeting a range of practical needs.
The challenge for those who design and run spaces is to make these spaces, as gallery education staff suggest, 'vibrant, culturally rich, exciting and sociable' and to create 'a sense of dynamism and flexibility'. The Artworks Creative Spaces Project is an investigation into the ideal spaces for creative, and specifically artistic, explorations.
Creating the right spaces
- What do teachers, gallery and museum staff, and children want from a creative space in terms of design, location, equipment and other resources, usage and management?
- What do they see as the competing priorities of the different users of such spaces?
- How best can they resolve the challenges of turning the ideal space into a reality that suits everybody's needs?
These were some of the key issues discussed by the Project's focus groups. It was quickly apparent that teachers and gallery and museum education staff have wide-ranging knowledge, experience and perception of what is needed in creative spaces. The question is, how can they achieve what they want? Or, more pertinently, why do they often fail to get the spaces they need? Gallery and museum staff say that the creative space should reflect the ethos and purposes of the gallery or museum in which it is located. Teachers want the creative space to represent a creativity that should pervade the whole school. As such, getting the creative space right is as important as getting right the whole gallery, museum or school.
For some, this raises the question: When should the creative space be limited to a specific room or area, and when should the whole gallery, museum or school be seen as the creative space, and designed and used as such?
Galleries and museums are increasingly being seen as having a crucial role as 'public learning centres in fostering the creative skills of children and adults, who are the makers and consumers
of the present and future' (A Common Wealth: museums in the learning age, David Anderson, DCMS, 1997 & 1999). This suggests that the aims of a creative space in a gallery or museum have to be more ambitious than those for the venue as a whole.
For example, the space has to cater for a wide range of activities and users. It has to encourage and provide for all kinds of learning - formal and informal, self-directed and practical as well as traditional and academic - as well as for the full range of learning styles and users. Spaces should, according to one gallery education officer, be 'challenging, open-ended and springboards for activity'.
The same can apply to schools, where teachers often define the aims of an ideal space as extending the school's ambitions beyond the commitment to fulfil the requirements of timetables, standard assessment tests (SATs), the national curriculum, and literacy and numeracy strategies.
A third consideration is that, in the opinion of many teachers and gallery and museum education staff, creative spaces in galleries, museums and schools should complement one another - but not be, or offer, the same. One teacher commented: 'A creative space is somewhere you can go which isn't "school" and isn't "processed".'
Fulfilling these ambitions means analysing the creative space from four related perspectives; addressing the challenges that each presents; and involving teachers, gallery and museum education staff at every stage:
- Design: how to plan and design the space
- Usage: identifying and catering for all the users
- Content: deciding what goes on in the space
- Logistics: how to organise what goes on.
