Visual Arts education awards 05

engage Scotland Visual Arts Education Awards 2005

engage is pleased to announce a new partnership for the 2005 Awards.  Engage is a professional association promoting greater access to and enjoyment of the visual arts through education and engagement. 

The 2005 focus on ‘Well-being and Creativity’ will reward visual arts education projects that bring participant, art and artist together in a memorable, enhancing experience.  The Scottish Executive’s National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Well-being are sponsors of this year’s awards.

Education work in the visual arts can happen in galleries, schools, streets, forests and the approaches can be as varied as the locations. Participants, young and old, can be working with a living contemporary artist or the work of long dead painters.

Nothing is prescriptive and it is the negotiation between participant and artist, educator and curator that can lead to stimulating experiences that challenge all the partners.

The awards seek out projects that enable a wider audience to engage more fully in cultural life.  Projects should also value the contribution of participants and the process of exchange. These one-of-a-kind awards have a wide understanding of education and a whole population approach to participation. Initiated by the Scottish Arts Council in 2001, they represent significant investment in future education work and promote good practice and elevated status for visual arts projects in Scotland.

The Awards ceremony will take place on 30 June at the National Galleries of Scotland's Weston Link, showcasing the winning projects and celebrating the positive impact of creativity on well-being. A publication detailing the winning projects and exploring the 2005 Awards theme will be launched in Autumn this year.

‘If I wrote down all the things I enjoyed I would run out of paper’, wrote a Shetland primary pupil after the Travelling Gallery visited her school last year. This experience, tricky to describe but eloquently put, encapsulates what the engage Scotland Visual Arts Education Awards are all about.

Last year's awards included skateboarding urban planners, sketching train passengers, self portraying sign writers and gallery hijacking under five’s. The awards are about new opportunities to engage in the visual arts, new partnerships with galleries and communities, new collaborations of artist and participant.

Ten awards of £1,000 are available : four to projects which promote positive mental health or which challenge stigma and discrimination and /or promote recovery from mental illness and six further awards for visual arts education projects promoting general well-being and creativity. The Awards are for projects completed in the previous year and the prize money is to support future education work. Deadline for entries is 16 May 2005.

The images shown above are from 2004 winners North Edinburgh Arts Centre for Big Art Wee Hands and Munlochy Primary School for Big Fence Big Sign.

For fuller details of the 2005 Awards, previous winners and the work of engage Scotland contact Rebecca Marr.