At a university where the Faculty of Arts still lacks an art department, it is a relief to observe that the fourth-year education students specialising in art have kept up their yearly tradition of holding an exhibition of their own art at the end of their course. The initiative is taken under the guidance of artist and co-ordinator Dr Raphael Vella and this year it involves Deandra Agius, David Cassar, Kristina Ciantar and Sarah Meli. I spoke to Sarah Meli, who talked to me about what this exhibition, entitled XY4, means to this group of future teachers.

I ask Sarah the obvious first question: How did the idea for the show originate? Sarah tells me that the group started thinking of the exhibition at the end of the last scholastic year: “Our exhibition is about adolescent issues linked to emotions using graffiti.  Since graffiti is basically art in a public space, we thought that it would fit well with the idea of exhibiting it in public.” She adds that while the project is a pooling in of their collective ideas, each student gave his/her individual touch by tapping into his/her own experience of adolescence. However, art being such a personal thing, how difficult was it to work as a group and still find one’s own voice, I ask. Sarah tells me that it helped that the four students got on very well and that they decided they were going to work together from the get-go. “We decided to find a compromise under the guidance of Dr Raphael Vella, who saw us through the whole process.  Even though the work is put together as one structure, we each had a side of our own.” The group opted for consistency in composition through the use of common formal elements such as the colour scheme, which included black, white, greys, and red; the text, which had to be in typewriter-font; and the figures, which had to be stencilled with a gloss spray.

I ask Sarah whether they thought of the theme or the medium first. She answers that they came up with the two simultaneously, while pitching ideas for the project: “Deandra thought of graffiti – the medium – while Kristina thought of the theme of emotions and I thought of adolescence since we will soon be teaching secondary school students.” Wondering whether it was difficult to have a single theme to work around, I ask Sarah whether any of them felt restricted. “No, I don’t think we felt restricted and it was not that difficult to compromise either.  The vast experience Dr.Vella has with art exhibitions helped us reach practical decisions.  Since we each had our own side, we all had our space and we worked on the same theme but each one of us focused on different issues of adolescence.”

The ‘blurb’ on the Facebook event said that the students want to place contemporary art in a public space. When I ask her about people’s awareness of contemporary art in Malta, Sarah emphasised that there is interest and curiosity about art, but what is crucial is how one nurtures that curiosity. “With regard to young people, I think that the awareness and significance of art is growing steadily – I believe that education is key in helping the awareness and appreciation of contemporary art to grow,” she adds. This leads on to my next question, which is related to the complaints we regularly hear, and find ourselves making, about what we perceive to be a lack in young people’s cultural and artistic awareness. I ask Sarah what she thinks of teachers’ role in this, and about the obstacles teachers continuously encounter in trying to instil this awareness.

“One of the main obstacles I found during my teaching practice was that art is generally viewed as an ‘easy’ subject because it does not involve writing essays or working out mathematical equations and therefore students might not take the subject seriously.  In order to fight against the obstacles and instil awareness, I think that a teacher would have to be dedicated in giving art lessons which show how art is part and parcel of our visual culture and stubborn enough in believing that art is indeed as important to the students as the core subjects.  My other teachable is a core subject and I would not dare say that art is less important – if anything, it complements it and can be used to show students how art can feature in different aspects, by trying to include art when teaching the core subject and vice versa.”

Finally, I ask Sarah whether she sees art as something separate from her teaching career or as something which shapes it. Sarah insists on how essential it is for the art teacher to practise art: “You cannot teach art if you don’t practise it yourself – you can’t give students something you don’t have.” During her teaching practice, Sarah realised how keen some pupils are on their teacher’s art work. Furthermore, Sarah feels that she gained a lot from her lecturers’ experience as artists. “We can also see from our experience that our art lecturers, who are brilliant artists themselves, are an inspiration to us and proved to us that, as an art teacher, you must know how to teach the subject and also keep up with your art work.”

The exhibition is on at Ghar id-Dud in Sliema until the 15^th of June. It is being supported by the Malta Arts Fund, P.C. Handyman, Nexos and the Faculty of Education of the University of Malta.