Mentorship Program

County arts mentors share their knowledge and experience

The Prince Edward County Arts Council celebrated the success of its inaugural Mentorship Program on Tuesday, March 26 with an entertaining and informative panel discussion providing a view into the challenges and accomplishments of the mentorship pairs’ activities over the past four months. The program was funded by the provincial government’s Seniors’ Community Grants pro gram. Participants in a wide variety of artistic disciplines were paired with members of the community to share their knowledge and experience. The program is intended for community members ages 55 and older, but also included younger participants. County Arts put out a call for mentors last November, and 10 artists were chosen by a peer assessment group to participate. Their disciplines covered painting, poetry, ceramics, furniture making and more. Members of the community were then invited to apply to be paired with one of the mentors. The funding stipulates that at least 65 per cent of the potential mentees had to be over the age of 55. The mentors then chose who they would like to be paired with from the list of entrants. The pairs later met to discuss what project they would be working on. Each pair had a total of 25 hours of mentorship activities over the past four months. The mentors were given an hourly wage from the funding and the community applicants were given an honorarium. The panel discussion allowed the 10 mentor-mentee pairs to share their experience about the mentorship program. Some of the works they created were also in display. One of these was a video of a dance created by Arwyn Carpenter that was based upon his mentor Bill Stearman’s quilt designs.

Another of the mentors was poet JC Sulzenko, who was paired with Heather Lindsay. They met to discuss what Ms. Lindsay’s goals were. “I was really surprised and elated when Heather came to define so much more clearly the passion for writing poetry rooted in nature and her desire to bring together and publish a small collection of thematically related poems. From my point of view it represented a real leap forward,” said Ms. Sulzenko. Ms. Lindsay was grateful for the mentorship, and she read five short poems she created during the process. “The whole experience has been a gift. It felt for me like a poetry greenhouse. All winter I had these poems that were like seedlings and JC helped me tend them and eventually grew into a book. It has been an emboldening and enriching experience,” she said.

Katrina Tompkins was another mentor. She recently returned to Picton from Newfoundland and works primarily in wood, making free-standing furniture and toys. She was paired with Hale Ferguson, one of the younger community members.

Mr. Ferguson had done a little carpentry during the past summer, but wanted to take a more artistic approach. At first Ms. Tompkins wanted to steer Mr. Ferguson down a different path, but he was adamant that he wanted to design his own piece from scratch. They ended up building a small conceptual model before building the full-scale chair. “Katrina is the one person I trust to guide me in a way where I could do something outrageous, and I knew she would meet me in the middle to collaborate on that. She helped me make my ideas come to life. I wanted to learn and have confidence with the tools I am using. I wanted to have confidence in designing, and I got all of that in a safe space with a mentor that I trusted and felt good with,” said Mr. Ferguson. For Ms. Tompkins, the mentorship program was a way to get a little bit out of her comfort zone. “All of my work is in craft, whether it’s education, fabrication or design. The mentorship relation is so healthy in craft, and at the core of it that is what craft has always been, about bringing up apprentices, and I feel very honoured to have had that opportunity with Hale,” she said.

County Arts Program Manager Stacey Sproule was thrilled with the participation and the quality of the work that came out of it. “I think this is an incredibly successful program. I’ve had a lot of feedback from the pairs that they were learning things they never expected to learn. They’re discovering things about their own practises, and It’s really widening their understanding of what’s possible within the arts and feeling more of a sense of belonging and connectedness,” she said.