Adieu

My favourite teacher, when I was at school, was my art teacher.

I don’t know if she would remember me, so many years later, but I haven’t forgotten her.

She only taught me for two years, when I was one of her ‘leetle leetle Std 6s’ and then one of her ‘leetle’ bigger Std 7s (in Grades 8 and 9), but the interest she took in me and my work made all the difference, especially at a time when my own interest in my school work was flagging.

She seemed to delight in each of us, her artists, in our mischief as much as our imaginations. And I think we, at a rather rigid and old-fashioned girls’ school, appreciated her impishness and wonder as much as her artistic and teaching abilities...

This was her farewell to us...

As a teacher now myself, I’ve since found out how hard it can be to say goodbye to students – but also how much easier it is to stay in touch.

We may have gone our separate ways, but I like to think that we may still meet up again, my past students and I, somewhere in the world – in the UAE perhaps, or Bahrain, Turkey, Pakistan, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan... That our farewell was more an au revoir than an adieu...

So...

Till we meet again...

Later...

Matryoshka

I bought this matryoshka or Russian nested doll at a market in Abu Dhabi. These sets of wooden dolls were first carved in Russia in the nineteenth century and the creator was apparently inspired by a Japanese doll, perhaps a daruma. (Though I don’t know who made this particular doll or where it was made.)

Typically the outer doll is a Russian woman in traditional peasant dress but here she is an Arab woman in an abaya – I think this abaya is meant to suggest a traditional burqa worn by older married women (and those in rural areas) in the UAE (and also in Qatar and Oman, and by Arabs in southern Iran). But I don’t think an older and more conservatively dressed woman would wear her abaya open like that – though she may have something as garishly bright and patterned on underneath, who knows..?

Living in the Middle East, I was often surprised at the range of abayas (and other kinds of outer garments that women and girls there wear to cover themselves) and how colourful and intricately patterned they can be.

Perhaps that’s why I like the colours of these – that and the flash of what lies underneath..!

You can find out more about matryoshka and hijab on Wikipedia.

Taking off

Growing up, my brother and I both had BMX Raleigh Burners. They came out in the early Eighties and were bright and tough – they may be old school now but they were the latest and so popular back then!

We didn’t race or know any tricks but my brother had a go and set up a few stunts in our back garden. My favourite was a ramp at the side of our Portapool. We didn’t have a big garden but would pedal as fast as we could from the front garden to the pool at the back – up and fly off the top of the ramp – and, for just a moment, seem to hang in the air, before dropping and hitting the water, and slowly, slowly – so we pedalled all the more furiously, pushing against the weight of the water – sinking to the bottom. Then we’d pull our bikes out and race back to the far side of the garden to do it all over again...

And it was all the more fun because it was summer so we’d get back from after-school sport and take off still in our P.T. shorts and t-shirts, laughing all the way back in our clingy clothes.

Here’s a photo of my cousin Roz, and my brother Rich and I on our BMXs. We were visiting my cousins on holiday.

This year my brother has been hard at work building a house for his family. And this week my cousin and her three year old daughter are flying out to Malaysia to set up home with her husband there. She’s lived in the UK for – what? fifteen years now? – so this move is very exciting and, I think, a little scary.

But, I also think, so many of the best and most fun adventurers simply start out with a bike...

Give a girl a bicycle and she can go anywhere. Or believe she can – and that’s a start and what counts.

Turning the world inside out

I spotted this in Woodstock. It’s part of French photographer and street artist JR’s Inside Out Project.

The Inside Out Project has been travelling around the world and the photographs that were taken in Cape Town were pasted up around the city over five days in July last year. The project aims to address problems specific to each area and in Cape Town it’s racism between black and ‘coloured’ young people.

Unfortunately there’s very little about the project on JR’s website or the Inside Out website but, after some searching for it online, I found the story behind it...

Inside Out Cape Town was a collaboration between local government, Lalela Project (an organisation which provides art and music education to children-at-risk after school and over the weekends), Cape Town photographers Hasan and Husain Essop, as well as JR. The Nelson Mandela Foundation also supported the project as it culminated on Mandela Day 2011, 18 July. Thirty Hout Bay High School students were taught the basics of portrait photography over two months by twin brothers Hasan and Husain. This group consisted of 15 students from Imizamo Yethu (the black community) and 15 from Hangberg (the ‘coloured’ community). The students from the two groups then paired up with each other (one from each community) in order to get to know the other person before photographing each other. JR’s team made the large-scale prints (some as big as 10 x 15 metres) and the kids then pasted their portraits up at each other’s homes and helped paste them up at a number of places around Cape Town, including the Central Library.

JR was awarded the 2011 TED prize. He's said that he wants to catch the attention of people who are not museum visitors. Most people don’t have museums around them or just don’t go to them – let alone pay to see exhibitions. He says his work ‘mixes art and action; it talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit’. He also says that his art hasn’t changed the world – but it might have made someone somewhere laugh unexpectedly (http://www.jr-art.net/).

Well, this photograph made me smile. There’s just something irresistibly mischievous about someone pulling faces...

And I hope that the kids who participated found something that really involved them in the project – curiosity, openness, some recognition, a little more trust and understanding maybe?

At the time, one of the students from Imizamo Yethu Amanda Gaetywa said that pasting up the portraits of black and ‘coloured’ students side by side was ‘like we are bringing the two communities together.’ Another student Zimasa Dyani said that ‘at first we didn’t speak to the coloured people because we have been really separated from apartheid and now we have a stepping stone to communicate with them’ (Cape Times). Students continue to participate in Lalela Project’s programmes.

Watch this if you’d like to find out more about JR: 

If you’d like to participate in Inside Out (you can upload your own photographs which will be made into posters and sent back to you to paste up in your own area): http://www.insideoutproject.net

A SEN school in Margate in KwaZulu-Natal has also participated in the project – you can see their students’ portraits on the website.