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Green Pebble Magazine
Will
Teather: Where There's
A Will...
Green Pebble Winter 2007 issue
When Norwich
artist Will Teather travelled north to Scotland to take up his artist-in-residency
position at the Aberdeen Art Centre, he expected it to be cold and wet. It
was. Although, in fairness, the sun did come out for his arrival.
He also expected the experience to help him develop his art, which it also
did, but most of all he hoped it would provide him with some publicity.
And this it most certainly did, beyond expectation. The Aberdeen Art Centre
publicity machine was so effective, in fact, that at one stage the keywords
‘Will Teather’ were said to have been at the top of the most searched
words on a local website.
To meet Will is to like him. He is young, 27, and has an easy, friendly style
which played a significant part in the selection committee’s decision
to choose him; they wanted someone who could inspire the general public. The
Art Centre was originally looking for a Scottish artist but of the short-listed
national and international applicants, Will, who usually teaches at the Norwich
School of Art & Design, ‘struck a chord’.
‘Artistically, socially, he had everything we were looking for,’
says venue manager Paula Gibson. ‘We were impressed with the way he
said he was going to manage the residency. Here was someone who was so inspired,
and he was walking on the same road we were walking.’
He wasn’t perfect, she hastens to add. ‘He was a typical artist.’
By this she meant that Will was neither tidy nor easily bound to time. ‘But
he was utterly charming,’ she adds fondly. ‘And he learned things
for himself. He had to.’
The residency was the Aberdeen Art Centre’s first, and as such Will
was expected to take on a thoroughly hands-on role. He had to project- manage
the entire two-month schedule, develop and run workshops and public events,
and he had to progress his own work.
He organized a number of popular weekend art workshops but his greatest achievement,
according to Paula, was a portrait competition for which Will painted a portrait
of Aberdeen’s Lord Provost, Peter Stephen, as a means of raising the
competition’s profile. The result was not only a coup for the Centre,
but it generated a ‘fantastic’ number of entries and outstanding
publicity...
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