When one first meets Asha Duggan and Lily Mae Martin, what becomes obvious is that they are two very different young women. Asha, older by three years, is a lot more reticent and speaks in a thoughtful manner. Lily, on the other hand, is garrulous, or, to use her own word, ‘opinionated’. What brought such distinct personalities together? Art.
They are the first young people to complete the Rudder Project, an art-mentoring pilot project based at the Artful Dodgers Studios and run under the auspices of Gateway, a Jesuit Social Services’ program. The culmination of Asha and Lily’s participation in the project was a successful exhibition held in Melbourne earlier this year.
It was a dream come true not only for them, but for artist Sally Marsden, who spearheaded the project. A long-time practitioner of community cultural development, she had been looking for ways to enable young artists, who wouldn’t otherwise have the means to establish a career in art, to move into the field.
‘One of the hardest things about studio participation is that it is a successful model,’ she says wryly. The Artful Dodgers Studios has proven strategies for engaging young people and sustaining their participation in activities that prepare them for employment and educational and community outcomes. The next step, Marsden felt, was to disengage—to help them move out of the program with the skills and confidence to create their own future. She was also concerned with passing on community cultural development skills to a new generation of artists willing to work with marginalised young people. Thus, the Rudder Project was conceived.
Duggan and Martin were chosen from eight applicants and matched to artist mentors Jacqui Stockdale and Laura Woodward. According to Duggan, creating art preceded the mentoring relationship: ‘As soon as we get into the same room, we make art. We don’t really say, “You’re mentoring.”’
While Marsden takes a different view, she confirms that what differentiates art mentoring from other models of community-based mentoring is the focus on artistic results. In the case of the Rudder Project, this covered skills required for an art career such as business, research, computer competency and time management.
Duggan was clear on her expectations of the project in this respect. ‘I wanted to know if it was possible for me to take a leap out of my structured lifestyle and learn something that I really wanted to do,’ she says. ‘I wanted