workshops in prison

Plastic artist Dominique Ghesquière ran a thirty-hour sculpture workshop at Versailles women’s prison, organised by the Yvelines Rehabilitation and Probation Service, the Onde contemporary arts centre (Villacoublay) and the Foundation. A look back at the workshops held last May and June.

Was it the first time you had been to a prison?

That’s right. The suggestion came from the Onde centre, for whom I’d done some work the previous year on a primary level art and culture project class. That was a twenty-hour programme, helping final-year primary school children complete an art project, culminating in a collaborative work with the gardening staff at Versailles Château.

Do you see a link between the two activities?

Yes, for both the children and the women prisoners it was, strictly speaking, more a question of an artistic approach than of art itself. At the prison, our aim was to make a recognisable object out of simple materials¾chipboard in this case¾making it pliable even though it isn’t usually.

What questions arose for you during this prison workshop?

How to harness the motivations of people from very different backgrounds, so that everyone could make sense of the experience without feeling used in any way. Unlike the women there, I brought a certain experience, an educated perspective and an interest in art. What interested them rather was the opportunity to take part in a workshop¾offering some of them the possibility of consideration for early release, or others a chance to use what they made in order to bond with their child. All four workshop participants had young children from whom they were separated. So two of them took advantage of the opportunity to make something that they could take along to the visiting room and show their child. One of them made a heart springing out of a box with a message attached and the other made a sort of hide-and-seek tree. It was ingeniously put together, with little pictures of animals concealed under the leaves of the tree …

Did you get feedback during the workshops?

They all said, at some point during the workshop, that they loved the fact that time had passed so quickly because they were concentrating and involved in what they were doing. One of them even said she was surprised to have made something so beautiful­¾she had never thought herself capable of that.

Were you given particular terms of reference?

There were to be thirty contact hours, divided into ten 3-hour sessions. Obviously there were constraints. For the hide-and-seek tree we worked out a compromise together. The prisoner agreed not to add colours in order not for her object not to stand out too much from those of the others. For my part, I agreed that she could stray from the original brief in terms of including pictures of animals within the object.

Let’s go back to the beginning. How would you say the sessions went?

The atmosphere certainly depended a great deal on the participants and how they were getting along. But we quickly became quite a tight little group. At the beginning, there were warders there on and off, because of the fact that we were using cutters. We spent several sessions on working out our approach­¾how to create a certain volume from a flat sheet of paper? And the same goes for a piece of cardboard. We then experimented with folding¾how to fold card into a cube for example? Next, we had a joint brainstorming session, with each participant in turn identifying the things she most missed and then choosing one important object from their list. Finally, we thought about ways of making them pliable. As Gilles Deleuze said, we wanted to create ‘minimal volume from maximum material!’

You were creating metaphors?

Yes, but I’d be very reluctant to interpret them. For me, each of these prisoners was in charge, entitled to put whatever she wanted into her object.

Did you all share?

On the last day, we spent some time putting the objects side by side and looking at them. It was a grey and sober spectacle, made of an unchanging material, which meant your attention was drawn to other aspects. There was nothing visually distracting, which led rather to a sort of focus on intriguing details: the jointed surface of floor-tiles, a folding bed head. It was actually quite poetic.

And what did you get out of it, personally?

I’d never been in a prison and so I found it a very powerful experience. The atmosphere in such a place is striking¾the sounds, the sense of being cut off from the outside world, the long journeys from one room to another, the constant presence of the warders, the omnipresent locked doors. This struck me each time I headed for the plastic art room and also while waiting for the prisoners, shut away as I was in this room with its window high up above¾not even a glimpse of the outside. Of course, I didn’t ask the prisoners any questions…and they only asked me a few things in turn, just whether I had children and what my life as an artist was like. I deliberately kept a certain distance, for example using the polite ‘vous’ form when addressing each participant. But I’d like to come back to the question of the place of each of the women in the group we formed during the workshop. One of them had real problems with taking the slightest initiative. But towards the end of the workshop, she made a decision concerning her object­¾ignoring the advice of the others¾and what’s more she did so without asking anyone. That was a small victory…