Make Online: Rethinking Practice, 9th July, 6.30pm – 7.30pm

How can teaching reflect the complexity and messiness of artmaking and the contexts that it’s taught within?

Join us for the next session of make online, where four artist-educators will explore how context shapes creative practice. Drawing from experiences in settings as diverse as a rural secondary school, a community of young carers, a ceramics workshop and a men’s prison, they’ll share insights from artmaking in different environments.

In teaching, it is common to strive for a formula – a tried and tested way of working that can be applied in any context at any time. However, the creative enquiry of artmaking is not predictable; it is complex, experimental and leads in many directions, sometimes all at once.

In four quick-fire, 10-minute rounds, each presenter will share methods, processes and approaches they’ve tested that consider not only the content that they teach, but the context in which they’re teaching, asking: why is art important here?

Each speaker will give a short presentation of their work back-to-back, after which there will be time for audience questions.

 

Presentations

Sum Gainda

Drawing on research from her MA in Contemporary Art Practice and the development of ‘Draw in Clay: Restorative Workshop’, this presentation discusses a process-led approach to making that explores creativity beyond productivity and fixed outcomes.

Maraid McEwan

What does it mean to an artist facilitator when a method just doesn’t fit? In her presentation, Maraid explores her ‘Tracing Back’ approach, a method developed while working with young carers, which called for typical approaches to emotions and objects to be reversed.

Jessica Ostrowicz

Embracing failure can get us unstuck. Drawing on personal experiences of teaching art in prisons, Jessica will explore how failure can function as an artistic, pedagogical and philosophical practice, unsettling assumptions and creating the conditions for new forms of making, learning and understanding.

Clemency Wood

What happens when a rural state school replaces its Year 9 curriculum with an experimental, contemporary-art-informed pedagogy? Reflecting on a curriculum intervention conducted for PhD research at a school in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, this presentation covers what worked, what went wrong, what happened to students’ understanding of what art is and what next for art education.