All the Little Starlings

Hi everyone,

This week brought some exciting news to my world- an offer to study a Masters in Education at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I had some very specific reasons for applying that relate to what I’d like to do next and, given the subject of my writing last week, I feel like it might be nice or interesting to just share an excerpt from the presentation I gave at the audition, which takes the form of a letter about what it meant to access the arts as a young person in Dundee. There’s also a small request for ideas at the end.

“Life is BIG, be all you can be” are the words that were spoken over me repeatedly as a young person by a man called Chika Inatimi, the founder of Dundee charity, Front Lounge, which focuses on the development and creativity of young people across the city and beyond. As a child of teenage parents who carries a physiology-level understanding of the issues surrounding whole-community deprivation, violence, substance abuse and hopelessness, the expected outcomes for my life might have been similar to some of the worst things my home is known for. Only last week, a fellow artist and I were relating a common experience of glancing along the rows of our school photographs and listing who had died, turned to drugs or ended in prison. More subtle a tragedy than that to me is to know that human beings I once knew as beautiful and lively children somehow lost sight of their beauty and their potential. It should break any heart.

While still imperfect, what I just mentioned has not been my story at all and I credit that with two things; being called an artist as a child and being treated with love. I experienced it at Front Lounge and I experienced it in a music career that began with one woman asking me to sing, then a wonderful high school teacher and free music tuition in Dundee and then scholarship and encouragement at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I messed up my first audition here; I felt like a very obvious working class fish out of water, but the tenderness and humour of a gentle-hearted oboe teacher, Stephen West, made it possible to transition into this world and, consequently, to see a whole world beyond.

As I've grown and studied, I’ve also come to understand how inequality and injustice is driving pain in people. We are in survival mode. So, how do we co-create a world where more people feel free to sing, to make things, to breathe?

As an artist, I would describe my work as ‘enchanted realism’, a blend of ethnographic observation of the world as it is and an element of deep longing for the world as it could be, for communities as they could be, for myself as I could be- and, of course, the grief that lives in the space between. The humpback whale, a motif synonymous with the myth of Dundee, has become one of the visual symbols for me of our attempts to pursue something bigger than ourselves, to transcend sorrow and hardship in community with one another.

As an educator, I have spent fourteen years now chasing a deep need to know; why was my life different? What made the difference? What is replicable? Honestly, I need it to be replicable. I cannot accept that tragic alternatives are the only way for so many people. Over the last decade, I have spent my time working (mostly voluntarily) in schools and community, facilitating people to tell their stories and just listening and recording. This has taken the form of co-creating books, offering lots of one-to-one support and making five storytelling theatre spaces in empty shops to have magical places to meet one another. I have borrowed ideas and models from all over the world (such as 826 Valencia), while trying to understand the steps of transformation. If there are tangible concepts to learn and share, I want to understand them deeply and for that which is not tangible, I want to be someone in the business of spreading the love I was shown, simply and repetitively, as core a part of my practice as picking up a paintbrush.

I am applying to RCS to have rigorous supervision that asks the hard questions, to have a peer group, to build an evidence base for creative and playful interventions in the early years and to be part of the big picture conversation and speak up for the people I work with. I don’t want to be let off with things that only end up serving me and making a job for me; I need ways to understand what is actually working and how to do more of it. I would like to go significantly deeper on these issues, get to know people who share the same dreams, and find ways to move the needle together.

Thank you for considering my application today.

When I read this back today, I feel a bit vulnerable; maybe I brought too much earnest to an academic interview, too much idealism, maybe I sound naive? Should I have said so much about home? I don’t want to betray the home I love by exposing the difficulties. It’s hard to say now, but it doesn’t matter because I really do feel these things a lot. I was offered a place on the spot.

For the past number of months, I’ve been working and volunteering with a brilliant school in Dundee, St Fergus Primary. This school is a street away from where I went to high school, in an area like ones I’ve described. There are a lot of complex needs in one building. The first time I met the headteacher, I knew immediately that our values aligned, because she was talking about making sure all the kids felt loved, respected and included. And honestly, in schools, you pick up the vibe as soon as you walk in the door.

I’ve been making a massive murmuration with all the children in school to illustrate their self-chosen school values, with a little starling made by every single child, cutting out 176 birds. It’s laborious but it matters. In school, we watched videos and listened to music from Spell Songs, and we talked about how murmurations work; how each starling pays attention to the six or seven nearest fellows, how we too could function well as a community if we just thought of seven folk to show love to on the regular. As I cut out each birdy, I think ‘Let this one fly’, and it’s hard to not think about what they’re up against. Yet here is this colour and life made of paper in my hands. All these little starlings.

So, in pursuit of this masters degree, I’m aiming to spend 3 days per week in pursuit of learning while working in St Fergus and other settings with primary aged children and their families, being an extra support and running a research pilot related to literacy and imagination, building on previous research I’ve carried out as the leader of Hidden Story for five years. I firmly believe small kids are best placed to lead on imaginative change; they inhabit magic and reality seamlessly at once, and our hearts are hopefully tender enough towards them still that we can enter their world of possibility rather than drag them into ours.

At a minimum, there is a power to being a witness to the stories of others. As a medium benefit, a school with needs will have an extra support person and maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn and articulate things that can create wider change. Those are my hopes, anyway.

I can’t actually afford any of this currently. I’m a solo parent to two wee legendary lassies who need care. I’ll need to find a solution to the academic fees and find ways to cover my time so I can study and work with schools. It’s a real consideration but, to me, the sense of mission is the most important thing. For whatever reason, story things are what I can bring to this world and it feels like I know how to actually use that passion now to affect change.

I’ll be continuing to work the other half of the time as an illustrator and writer of books and other things and I’ll be continuing with substack. I’m lucky to still have two book contracts in progress, some museum work and residencies on the calendar.

If you are minded to support the endeavour I’ve just outlined, here are a few ways:

• Tell some friends! You just never know who might hear about something and have the perfect solution.

• Support this Substack. I’m keeping this publication free but if you felt like voluntarily contributing, that would be lovely. I’ll be sharing the journey here.

• Check out my wee shop: Prints are there now and after summer we will have calendars, more cards, journals and maybe some originals.

• Chat about commissions: I’d consider projects of reasonable size with long enough timelines that I could fit them in.

• Sign up for mentoring: I’ll soon be offering one to one coaching on books, publishing, social enterprise and business. I understand colourful non-linear brains and am here to help figure out the path, whatever the project. Email Naomi at admin@lightonthesea.co.uk and ask her to put you on the mailing list for mentoring information.

• Donations welcome: If you’re interested to just directly support my studies or the work in Dundee, please get in touch at gillian@lightonthesea.co.uk.

• If you know of small trusts, scholarships or similar that might consider me, please do let me know. I probably have about 7 weeks to come up with the fees for year one of three part-time years of study and research. (Roughly £5.5k per year for 3 years). I’m about to make some kind of fun illustrated mail out to send to all the trusts I can find.

Thank you so much for reading this week! More poetic things next week.

Love, Gill