Session 1C : Bourdon 1st Floor Lecture Theatre
Friday June 9th, 2023 : 10:00 – 12:30
Overview
If we assume that a fine art degree programme focusses on ‘studio practice’ as a largely self-directed method of working, the question arises: how as artist-tutors are we preparing our first year students, many of whom come directly from school, and are therefore used to an exam-driven curriculum and pedagogy, to become self-determining young artists, confident with ‘not knowing’ and getting on with it anyway. Furthermore, despite today’s multi-facetted ‘art world’ offering an array of career pathways, notions of talent, innovation, and novelty endure, ensuring both hierarchical divisiveness and competition. Could the role of an art school be to offer an alternative model by supporting students in ‘not knowing’ as a life-long facility invaluable in today’s world of precarity and climate catastrophe?
Speakers
Anna Douglas
Adam Gillam
Adam Gillam (b.1970) works across painting, photography, and sculpture. He creates delicate structures, images and compositions that have an impromptu, ad-hoc and restless quality, akin to a makeshift moment given form. Scraps of materials, studio detritus, images, drawings and collected ephemera are assembled in an intuitive and bricolage fashion. Adam has shown in numerous galleries and institutions including Camden Arts Centre, London, The Wilson, Cheltenham, Leeds City Art Gallery and FKA Witte de With, Rotterdam, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art, London.
Simon Lewandowski
Jo McGonigal
Kate McLeod
Kate McLeod (she/her) is an artist, researcher and lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. Her practice-based research explores a contemporary sculptural language around anti-monumentality, dialogic inter-relationships and classical figuration. Exhibitions include The Royal Society of Sculptors, London; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; JGM Gallery, London; Andipa Gallery, London. Residencies include CoLab, London; Brian Mercer Bronze Residency, Pietrasanta, Italy. Trained at Goldsmiths College and Slade School of Fine Art and spent 3 years working for Anthony Caro.
Stephanie Springgay
Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. She directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies www.stephaniespringgay.com On Not Knowing: Creating Brave Spaces in a new iArts BFA program