Graduation Speech

Thank you Seona, for inviting me to speak today. It’s a very great honour to be here, and to share the day with such a large number of people with so much creative potential, and their families and friends.

It’s exactly nineteen years since I last attended a graduation ceremony, and that was my own. But this is the very first time I’ve worn my academic gown: now I feel ready for it, and I like the idea of it. It’s nice to know, at last, what colours I have on my hood – I always wondered who decided what colour went with what qualification, and whether it was dictated by ancient laws or simply by a chance collision of colour and comptroller.

Either way, graduation is a strange phenomenon. It’s the only ceremony that we have at Glasgow School of Art. In fact, the School could be said to have an environment that’s largely ceremony and exam-free. Because of this it can be hard for people on the outside, our friends and families, to understand exactly what we do, how the School works and just how we achieve such high levels of success year after year.

Our recipe (and it’s an original and very old Scottish recipe) is one of immersive education where dedicated staff support learning and continuous assessment within a studio environment. The studio is the cornerstone of our system: it’s a special place where students learn from, and with, each other. It’s also the place where staff and students unerringly, relentlessly and totally, bend to the task of producing professional creative people. Unlike training, education can’t be forced on the uncooperative, it requires full participation and consent. There is no opportunity to miss classes or cram for exams, because those four, or more, long years are a huge exam and an enormous team effort.

Like many of you here today, I found coming out of the other end of Glasgow School of Art exhausting, inspiring and liberating. I was as ready as ever I could have been, when I was unleashed from Garnethill. Like some of you, I was the first person in my family to enter Further Education. But while I approached it as a great adventure, it was threatening and uncharted territory for my Mum and Dad. They had lived through the second world war and quite literally fought so that I could be educated. Because of people like them I could have studied geography, biology or politics, but my art teacher, Kate Thomson, intervened and told me, in absolutely positive terms, that I could forget about all of that, because I was going to Glasgow School of Art.

I was very lucky to have a teacher who recognised my potential and who helped me to make the right decision, but it was hard for my parents to know how to help me, what to expect or how to behave. While I was still at school my father would take me to and from life-drawing classes. While he had an unshakeable belief in the value of education, he doggedly refused to look at my work: he simply didn’t know how to deal with it, or with me. While my parents took unspoken pride in my continuing education and supported me as best they could, they harboured secret terrors about what happens in art schools. These were occasionally but ferociously expressed: the, “you’re-not-going-to-art school-if-you’re-going-to-do-stuff-like-that”, while watching a TV documentary on Picasso, stays with me and is the reason I continue to promote understanding of creativity and the increasingly huge contribution creative people make to our economy, as well as our culture.

In addition to teaching me to see, understand, and be in control of much of my life, Glasgow School of Art has given me many of the things I value most: the ability to be productively creative – to take pleasure in, and responsibility for, making something from nothing – which is the basis of all wealth creation and every form of civilisation; it gave me confidence in my abilities, to know my strengths, my weaknesses and my limits, and to be able to make the most of what I have, through hard work and tenacity; it made me respect other people and their ideas, the value of team working and the opinions of my peers; the School gave me the stamina and optimism to seek ever better solutions through creating new knowledge and new ways of working; it taught me to be brave and challenging and encouraged me to find new quests that continue to test and stretch me, my colleagues and my clients; it taught me to feel secure in the knowledge that creativity is the limitless resource at the centre of my life and that it can’t be taken from me, the School has also given me the unshakeable belief that my life is worthwhile and that I, like you, can make a difference.

The School did so much more than educate me and help me to grow up, on a more secular level, it was also a dating agency and business incubator. Through it I met my partner and co-conspirator of twenty years: Ross Hunter, the architect with whom I created our eighteen year old business; which now gives us, and our colleagues, secure, high-quality employment. Though I still lay the blame for setting-up my business fairly and squarely on my Father, who would have been just as content if I had become a secondary school teacher, so I would have a secure job. While well-meaning, the image he conjured up: that of returning to the world before art school, worried me so profoundly that I resolved to haul myself by the scuff of the neck into a future constructed from all that I had learned. With the support of the School, I founded a business in my Masters year, and if there are lessons to be learned from my experience they would be, listen to others but live your life; the skills that you have been given will help you turn your dreams into realities, if you work hard and believe in yourself, and never, NEVER, take ‘no’ for an answer.

The decision to study at art school can be difficult for families and friends but it’s amazing to see the effect of the School on the people we love. Education is powerful, and at its best it’s transformational and magical. I have a feeling that today’s ceremony is as much an acknowledgement of all of the unconditional support we receive as we learn and grow, as it is a celebration of what we and our tutors have achieved.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the closer you get to graduating and achieving your four or five-year goals, the less important these goals become. That’s when you know that you’ve been educated: it’s a process that starts and never stops and you will already have moved on to a new stage in your life with new challenges.

That is why, all those years ago, I didn’t wear my academic gown.