Nkumba University Art Gallery

Studio spaces (or a lack of them)

A student uses a 'nsululu' (pick axe) to prepare clay inside a ceramics/ sculpture studio. The floors and furniture are all smeared with very wet clay. The result of this kind of situation leaves the studio looking like a pigsty let alone a university studio. Some investment is needed to create specific places to prepare clay, sieve clays, grog, drying clay, store clay, carve wood, make concret works, making slip, throwing, etc

Being an art student or teacher in a university in Uganda has pretty much similar constraints of a severe lack of specialised space to allow for the creativity of the art student or teacher to be brought alive. I would argue again and again in opposition to universities in Uganda opting to reduce specialised art spaces in order to have more general happiness lecture rooms.

The class room feels more like a secondary room space where the practical artist/ student/ trainer does not have the opportunity to incubate, birth and preserve his/ her work in progress.  As a result of sharing spaces with others, the practical creative does not feel as if his/ her ideas/ projects/ creations will be valued, respected and preserved by the other occupants. A lot of good work is destroyed, too much bad work is hurriedly put together because the other people use the spaces for lectures and in the long run, these general happiness spaces end up in total chaos and promote also a culture of mediocrity.
More and more students do their practical work outside the prescribed studio space meaning also that less supervision time is accrued. It is difficult to conceive how a university space can be abused to the extent of being the place to sieve clay, prepare slip, floors used for drying clay, storing clay, wood, metal, etc. Sculpture and electric ceramic equipment is also stored and used in the same space. And if the equipment for welding comes, it likely will be used here. And the occupants have no studio ethics. The space is left uncleaned.
Moreover the art trainers also do not have studio spaces to be able to do and keep artwork projects to be shown as demonstrations for those students who learn by example and not simply by lecture methodology.

Office spaces are availed for paperwork, for people to sit before computers, for reading of books but most unfortunate of all, the creative visual persons who engage in the production ideas, artwork and prototypes get no proper spaces to operate at all. This must change if we are to get out of the mediocrity that we find ourselves.