Fool’s Gold

I want to be Rosalie Gascoigne when I grow up.

She’s one of my favourite artists. She gathered materials from the bush, factories, the side of the road to create art.

Where others might have seen junk, she saw possibility.

I am sure you can see where I’m going with this one…..😉

If not, stay with me….

I feasted on a treasure trove of Gascoigne’s work at an exhibition over the break.

‘Fool’s Gold’ (pictured) grabbed my attention. In her own words:

‘This one is all different yellows, and if the light shines on it…it reflects different yellows, different oranges, and what’s more it puts a lovely shadow on the floor, which is totally accidental, but who am I to discard accidents?’ Rosalie Gascoigne.

(Image Credit: Fool’s Gold, Rosalie Gascoigne, 1992)

There’s a lot of gold to unpack here for facilitators. I’ll keep it brief. Here goes.

Gascoigne’s Fool’s Gold reminds us to:

🔶 Look beyond the surface. There are as many ideas in a group as there are multiple hues of a colour in a painting. Even if it looks like a monochrome one.

🔶 Gold is a small word one very big rainbow. There are at least eight shades of gold. I’d heard of white, yellow and rose. I didn’t know there was also green, grey, purple, blue and black. If we think we’ve struck gold, dig a little deeper. There could be a lot more behind that one nugget.

🔶 Facilitation is an art. We help people bounce ideas off each other. To find the connections and patterns in their conversation. We can’t predict how that’s going to work. Like an artist playing with paint, trust the process.

🔶 There’s gold in the shadows. Like that ‘difficult’ participant, sitting there like a little storm cloud, while others work together. If we prod a little, that storm might break. Maybe we'll get a rainbow.

🔶 ‘Fool’s gold’ is often a misnomer. Some of the best discoveries are made by accident. Every minute spent designing our gatherings is valuable. Absolutely. But hold your plan lightly. Let it go to follow the group – to improvise.

It turns out that fool’s gold – pyrite – can actually contain small amounts of the real thing. Guess what? It’s really hard to extract, as Denis Fougerouse of Curtin University explained in The Conversation (June 21).

“Gold hiding within pyrite is sometimes referred to as “invisible gold”, because it is not observable with standard microscopes, but instead requires sophisticated scientific instruments.”

That’s cool. Facilitators mine the gold from groups – even from ‘fool’s gold’. So next time I hear someone say ‘anyone can facilitate’ , I’ll remember that facilitators are like that ‘sophisticated scientific instrument’.

Our gatherings may not gain the accolades that Gascoigne’s did. But we apply her practice every time we work with groups.

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*Hat tip to Ann Handey or this idea!

Links:

Found and Gathered exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria

Denis Fougerouse, Research Fellow, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Not So Foolish After All: fool’s gold contains a newly discovered type of real gold