On Tuesday, 27^th August, we were delighted to host about 80 students and staff from New College Lanarkshire in the St Andrews Building of Glasgow University, as we held an event to celebrate the artwork produced during a year-long collaboration between staff at the college, led by Mia McGregor, and the Waste Stories project.

The artworks were produced by students from the Cumbernauld and Coatbridge campuses enrolled in Visual Art Levels 3, 5 and 6, and Art Club. Some of them were on display at the Mitchell Library earlier this year, and the full exhibition was on display at the University of Glasgow for the last two weeks of August.

A group of current students from New College arrived at the St Andrews Building around 4pm on Tuesday 27^th August, after having visited SWG3 and Kelvingrove. Some of the students in this group had created works on display, others were new to the Visual Arts programmes and were seeing what their peers had achieved the previous year. Other artists joined us under their own steam, including some of the Art Club stalwarts. We were also joined by staff from across Visual Arts, and of course representatives of the University of Glasgow and Waste Stories including the Dean of Research in the College of Social Sciences and the Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Adult and Lifelong Learning, project team members Anna, George and Agnieszka, and writers Regi Claire and Ron Butlin.

After a welcome from Anna, artist Karen Calpin read her story, Brian and his Ginger (which we will feature in a separate post). Mia then gave a brief but powerful speech describing the experience of doing the
project, the difficult and challenging conversations that were had in class, and the impact it has had on her and her students.Award-winning writer and former Edinburgh Makar Ron Butlin then gave the first public reading of his new story, Murdo and Meg Clean Up the Seas (also to follow in a separate post).

The visitors then had time to look at the artworks on display and talk to each other about both creating and seeing the exhibition.

This collaboration came about after I talked to Mia (a committed educator and accomplished artist in her own right) about the Future Archaeologies of Marine Litter exhibit and told her about our work with Penny Humphreys and students studying Visual Communication at Dumfries and Galloway College. She loved the idea of using visual and plastic arts to tell multimodal waste stories. Through her amazing work and that of her colleagues Simone and Sheila, Mia brought Waste Stories into the Visual Arts curriculum for dozens of students studying for NQs at NCLAN, and into the College’s long-running Art Club. And what a fantastic range of artworks has been produced as a result. From pieces exploring the impact of waste and pollution on nature, to conceptual works that use waste materials to talk about wasted youth and wasted time, to pieces that explore our broken relationships with waste and value. As poet Regi Claire said of the exhibition:

‘Waste in all its grim, deadly shapes and particulars transformed into something hopeful… Here’s to caring for our planet and to helping people make more of themselves through education and art!’