Angela Findlay

At the age of 21, Angela walked into Long Bay Gaol in Sydney with a portfolio of her murals under her arm. Two weeks later she found herself facing a 30-foot wall, two Brazilian coke smugglers, a bank robber and a murderer. “I had this overwhelming sense of ‘This is it!’” she recalls.

Angela worked for the next 20 years with prisoners and young offenders in both England and Germany. Using painting as a tool she worked alone in locked rooms with prisoners ranging from terrorists and murderers to drug addicts and fraudsters.

Her powerful colour exercises broke down inhibitions and enabled prisoners to recognise and address their own offending behaviour. Fearless and undeterred by the obstacles of such a closed and charged system, she became a confidante for many prisoners gaining their trust, hearing their stories and encouraging them to make changes in their outlook, attitude and subsequently their daily lives.

As the Arts Coordinator of the internationally recognised Koestler Trust: art by offenders in London, Angela founded the Learning to Learn Through the Arts scheme through which established artists of all disciplines delivered a wide range of visual arts projects to offenders.

Her innovative and at times controversial approaches to the debate of ‘punishment vs. rehabilitation’ attract the attention, and ultimately respect, of even the most sceptical members of the public and the Criminal Justice System.

In the past decade, Angela turned her gaze from the “guilty” in our prisons to the “guilt” of post-WW2 generations of Germans. As an Anglo-German herself, she identified an inherited sense of shame about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which had been passed through the generations from her German grandfather, a decorated Wehrmacht General who fought on the Eastern Front, and her mother, a child living outside Berlin in Nazi times.

This led to the discovery of Germany’s intense and on-going process of apology and atonement, largely unknown in the UK, and their culture of memorials and counter memorials. With her dual nationality, Angela is in an ideal position to look objectively at Germany’s dark past but with the added benefit of a personal connection to and experience of it.

Angela is now known for looking at and revealing ‘the other side’ of many widely-accepted elements of history or society. As well as appearing on radio and television, Angela is a popular speaker in schools, NADFAS societies and organizations all over the country.

Angela’s talks reveal the fascinating journey of a young woman entering the notoriously terrifying world of prisons armed only with her paintbrushes and an ability to listen. They are moving, informative, inspirational, and highly original and crucially offer a deeper understanding of the general predicament of prisoners and young offenders caught in a cycle of crime and re-offending.

All audiences, pupils and adults alike, are engrossed and amazed not only by her insights but by her extraordinary collection of slides that so clearly demonstrate why prisons aren’t working effectively and how offending behaviour can be turned around through targeted artistic processes into true and lasting rehabilitation.