Night classes have always been a marker of really having your life together, for me. When I think of night classes I think either of people who eat organic vegetables and collect art, or of people who do one thing during the day but value their extracurricular interests highly enough to give up their evenings.
I don't feel like I have my life properly together. I don't think I eat much organic produce, I don't collect art because I can't afford it, and I am often crabby in the evenings, but I did just finish my first semester of night classes.
I took a screen-printing class, thinking that it might be a good idea to try something I'd never thought about before, and have some time out from my regular hobbies and commitments. I went into it pretty hopeful, but I had a better time than I could have ever imagined.
Initially, I thought that I was going to arrive in a classroom packed with people I didn't know, probably a lot older than me, and slowly and nervously learn the ropes of a visual art (something new and challenging for me), but it wasn't quite like that. Naturally, because it's Dunedin, I showed up to class and there were very few people and I knew all of them, the tutor and my high school boyfriend's mother being the most notable acquaintances.
Despite not being what I thought, class was easily the highlight of my last two months. It was such a relaxed environment and I felt genuinely excited about going in every week to learn and make things.
While I won't deny I enjoy being graded and assessed, university often makes you lose track of why you're going to class and doing what you're doing. Night class made me remember that I like learning new things and being outside of my comfort zone. Creating things in a learning environment just for the sake of creating them was refreshing and allowed me to feel a giddy sense of pride every time I overcame a series of mistakes and successfully created a print.
Up until now I'd always had a pretty good sense that cutting funding to the arts is awful and senseless, but taking night classes has really driven that home. Not everyone has the option of dropping a load of cash into their artistic endeavours, and not everyone has had the opportunity to go to art school or to choose to be an artist.
It's so important that everyone has access to artistic pursuits because they not only teach people skills they might desperately want to learn, but they also provide social learning environments that are really helpful for unwinding and spending valuable and productive time with yourself in a pressure-free space. And it's not only students that these classes are benefiting; the classes also provide an opportunity for tutors to share their hard-earned knowledge with their community.
I'm really happy I decided to try something new, and sad that I have to take a break between semesters before I can go back for more. I'm sitting at home now with about 70 screen prints littering my bedroom, evidence of a good many Tuesday evenings well spent. At my dad's house he still has the salt bowl he made in his ceramics night class years ago, and on my coffee table we have one of the lamps my aunt made in her leadlighting class. I hope people continue to care about and attend night classes so we don't ever lose this hugely important part of our community.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
