Birmingham School of Art invites all attendees to join us for further discussion at the private view of Harriet Carter’s Beyond Transposition. This viva exposition is exhibited in the School of Art gallery space (room G20).

Harriet Carter’s PhD is titled 'Beyond Transposition?' Exploring painting and the metaphysical through birdsong and Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux' and funded through the AHRC Midlands3Cities.

Abstract

This presentation explores claims that contemporary community arts projects have the power to bring about social change and challenges existing critical frameworks, which argue that such projects perpetuate the status quo. Terms such as community cohesion, social inclusion and community regeneration are often associated with community arts projects, and funding is typically based on the extent to which a project is likely to meet corresponding objectives. However, scholars argue that this terminology is problematic: regeneration can become gentrification, social inclusion may infer an othering of certain sectors of society, and community cohesion can suggest social homogenization rather than a recognition of diversity. Thus, the claims that community art can impact social change have been challenged.

Within the academic literature, there has been significant debate around the terminology of collaborative art practices, and various terms have been developed. Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells (2012) draws a distinction between ‘participatory art’ and ‘community art’. Grant Kester, in Conversation pieces (2004) proposes a theory of ‘dialogical aesthetics’. Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain (1995) argues for ‘new genre public art’. O’Neill and Doherty propose ‘durational art’ and Helguera uses the term ‘social engaged practice’. Within this discourse the term community art has fallen out of fashion and been marginalised as amateur. Through a close examination of the theoretical literature in this field, and consideration of the community arts movement that was established in the late 1960/early 1970s I develop a definition of community art that incorporates several key elements in its practice. These include: an embedded and durational approach, a dialogical approach, and an art as activism approach. It is these processes, when collectively brought together, that defines community art and distinguishes it from other collaborative practices.

To answer criticism that community art simply perpetuates the status quo, I draw on the work of Paulo Freire, and the development of the concept of critical citizenship. Citizenship education was introduced into the UK curriculum in 2002 to address a ‘democratic deficit’ (Wood 2012:16). However, analysis of this reveals a form of citizenship which promotes economic self-sufficiency, civic obedience, and voluntary action. Thus, there is little room for the development of critical engagement with society. Therefore, I utilize the critical citizenship framework (CCF) devised by Johnson and Morris (2010) as a lens to conduct an in-depth analysis of a case study; the Postcode Criminals project (2011-12) which was initiated by artist, Joann Kushner, and young people in Liverpool. The purpose of the project was to challenge the zero-tolerance style policing tactics employed in the city and the negative stereotyping of urban youth. Through the CCF which ‘maps key descriptors of critical pedagogy’ with ‘curricula manifestations’ (Johnson and Morris 2010:87) I examine how the processes employed within the project can provide a space where young people can develop the skills necessary to become critical citizens. This presentation will outline the value in assessing projects that seek to bring about change, from a critical citizenship perspective.

Bio

Sue Warner is a PhD researcher at Loughborough University with an interest in art and social change, particularly relating to young people. She is a trustee of Charnwood Arts, a community arts organisation in Loughborough, and sits on the steering committee of a local arts event, 'Into the Outwoods Sculpture Trail'.

Abstract

This paper disseminates the results of the author’s recent research into UK alternative art schools, pending publication in a special edition of the international journal Educação & Realidade: Within or Beyond the University? Experiences in Alternative Higher Education. Entitled ‘Experiments in Autonomous Art Education in the UK, 2010-Present’ (Hudson-Miles 2022), this paper critically surveys the recent wave of autonomous art schools established in the UK since the Browne Review of Higher Education Financing (2010). These experimental institutions are often deliberately transient or ephemeral. Consequently, they are often only documented on social media or other impermanent web sources. Previously, only the website of artist-researcher Sophia Kosmauoglou (2021) documented this alternative provision. Therefore, this paper represents the first attempt to document these experiments in UK Arts Higher Education for the historical record. Written for an international audience, the paper focuses on contextualising these institutions within the post-Browne economisation of UK HE (Brown 2015; McGettigan 2013). It argues that these alternative art schools not only supplement, but critique mainstream HE provision. The specificity of this critique is interpreted through the lens of global theories of critical pedagogy. In particular, it draws upon the recent work of the Edu-Factory Collective (2009), especially their proposals for a ‘global autonomous university’. Following the Autonomist Marxist theory (Tronti 2013 [1962]; Hardt and Negri 2006) that inspired their project, this paper argues that these new alternative art schools can be understood as ‘common autonomous institutions’. It also maps these experimental art schools onto De Sousa Santos’ (2018) categories of the polyphonic university, the subversity, and the pluriversity. For the NAFAE conference, I wish to demonstrate how these institutions are underpinned by principles of mutual aid, cooperation, community, solidarity, respect, inclusivity, and grassroots activism. As such, I argue that these institutions radicalise mainstream university notions of widening participation and community engagement. Furthermore, these institutions are constituting a new commons of art education. A Festival of Alternative Arts Education was intended for 2020 but cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. One of the aims of this paper is to explore new ways of facilitating dialogue between art educators inside and outside the academy.

Bio

Dr. Richard Hudson-Miles is an interdisciplinary researcher and educator. He is currently Lecturer in Design Cultures at De Montfort University, Leicester, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yale's Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. His research operates at the intersections of the history of design, continental aesthetics, radical social theory, and the sociology of art and design education. He will shortly be publishing an introduction to the thought of Jacques Rancière for Routledge.

Abstract

Feeling part of a community has proven to be a fundamental aspect of our social experience in online and offline environments. Notions of camaraderie and reconsidered creative landscapes fuel a seemingly utopian online learning experience.

We will explore the liberating and limiting effects of creative communities working together in online and physical environments. We will explore this in tandem with practice based online community creation, rooted in DIY radio and sound practices, with digital radio station and artwork; Rounded Radio. This online listening platform was created by Roshni Bhagotra, who is an artist and arts educator currently working at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, UAL within Digital Learning.

This artwork influenced a community oriented approach and led to the creation of a student centred project exploring the pedagogy of sound within the ‘live’ learning experience. This teaching and learning project will take place throughout the spring and summer terms in 2022 across the schools of Art, Design and Performance. Although this sonic practice led towards the creation of this hybrid teaching project, I believe the value in understanding the role of community is through the lens of this project, driven by the integration and understanding of technology.

By questioning the ethics and freedom in sharing unheard voices, Rounded Radio brings together an amalgamation of artists, musicians, educators, academics, non creatives, and other publics to participate in a collaborative and real time listening experience intended to ignite a sense of community.

We delve into democratic and sustainable approaches for tackling marginalisation amongst mixed level student cohorts, exemplifying the ‘unheard’, ‘regular’ and ‘unseen’ voices within digital and physical environments.

Prior to the global pandemic, community was experienced largely in physical buildings and public spaces owned by the university, shared for its students and staff. Join us as we reimagine and explore the challenges of our learning communities. Aims to create online commune across

multimedia disciplines manifested as a cross college orientated exploration of teaching with podcasts, rooted in pedagogic sonic practice.

Supportive and inclusive hybrid digital environments are at the heart of the student experience. We examine the cultural relevance, social desire, intimacy and necessity of listening experiences within gallery education, arts education and student led communities. This presents an extensive insight into the power of practice led communal experiences.

Bio

My name is Roshni Bhagotra and I work at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art, University of The Arts London (CCW). I currently work within the Digital Learning team at CCW and have experience working within a variety of student and staff oriented technical and academic positions in further and higher education.

I’m passionate about the power, impact and complexity community focused work can have in arts practice and education. I strive towards equality, diversity, access and inclusion within arts education and currently explore strands of these themes within my creative practice and work as an artist and practitioner.

Contact: r.bhagotra@arts.ac.uk, rbhagotra@outlook.com

Abstract

The theme of the proposal is an enquiry into what constitutes contemporary queer art practices within a temporality of a residence-based community.

2017 was marked by the first-of-a-kind Queer British Art 1861-1967 exhibition at Tate, curated by Clare Barlow. Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, has pointed out that such offering of ‘pre-history” of the queer presence is in part unavoidably speculative in the “aim to capture the diversity and ambiguity of its artists-protagonists’ (Barlow, 2017, p.7). In the same year, Alex Pilcher defined the investigation into queer art history as “the fertile interrelationship between art and the modern queer experience” (2017, p. 7). Lord and Meyer have recently expanded their 2013 original publication by 5 additional years covering 130 years of artworks from around the world in their second edition of Art & Queer Culture (2019). All mentioned examples show a recent tendency in finding frames for the art and artists that fall into a broad understanding of queer as an identity or a concept.  These attempts have been defined not by the artists themselves, but by the curators and editors theorising the new ground of queer visual culture. The proposed work comes to challenge this approach and investigate what constitutes contemporary queer art practices not only from the perspective of the researcher but from the perspectives of the artists as well as the viewers.

The proposed presentation is based on the case-study of queer artists residency, a community created for a specific period of time, which has culminated in the experimental exhibition, curated in 2019 in Brighton titled Natural Selection: Aberrant Resynthesis. As a result, the queer practices within the created community will be investigated from three different perspectives allowing for artists’ and viewers’ own understanding on queer aspects of the exhibition in addition to the one-dimensional point of view of the researcher/curator. The outcomes of this case-study are to be presented at the conference in person or online.      

Bio

Victoria Suvoroff is a Brighton-based contemporary artist, independent curator, and Art & Design lecturer in the further education sector (GBMC). She holds an MRes in Arts and Cultural Research (University of Brighton). Her ongoing PhD project (University of Leeds) focuses on the contemporary queer visual art practices in exile.

www.VictoriaSuvoroff.com

Abstract

Our project aimed to explore how the medium of radio can be used to generate a sense of proximity, presence, and shared learning for PhD students while studios were inaccessible during lockdown. We asked how the unique sensory and spatial qualities of radio could generate a community across and beyond the boundaries of the University. We wanted to explore the extent to which radio might function like Deleuze’s ‘crystalline image’ in film, bringing together discontinuous times and spaces into a sense of now.

We established a website, live streaming, and archival platform for oHPo, and led a series of workshops and listening spaces with masters and PhD students in our newly joined humanities, communications & media, and art & design research institutes. Through embedded reflection, the workshops questioned strategies of structured delivery that posit the radio space as a platform for outcomes (a ‘shop window’) and instead foregrounded a process whereby content emerges from (and creates) relationships. Careful and responsive working by Emma grew four broadcasts: the first with an individual student using radio space to explore the intersections of disability and class; the second exploring the nostalgia and strangeness of a degree show via a broadcast recorded live at from S1Artspace. The third broadcast was a programme curated by Julia Calver (PhD candidate) exploring the ‘co-articulates’ of individuals, group and structures, and including submissions from across humanities and art and design. Finally, we undertook a spoken word collaboration between Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow, that developed a community of alumni and students from three institutions.

Radio offers opportunities for diverse and shared curiosities to come together not just in the flattened screen space, but also in the sonic materiality of a listening space. It gave PhD students a material space—a studio—to consider ‘audience’, and to resist the isolated space of lock-down. The capacity of radio to bring the individual space of the listener into the shared experience of the specific times of listening (the scheduled broadcast) created the sense of ‘event’ that was missing from pandemic life—you had to be ‘there’. We are excited by the amorphous identity of the project: its edges are fluid—they oscillate with the different frequencies of the communities it draws together. Its developing processes and funding (with some additional support from teaching and PhD training budgets) intersect teaching, research, arts practice, and disciplines and levels of students. It is a space of liveliness and productive ‘indistinction’ which give a sense of possibility about other ways to learn and be together through and beyond the pandemic.

Bios

Emma Bolland is an artist and PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University. emmazcbolland@gmail.com 

Becky Shaw is an artist, Reader in Fine Art and Postgraduate Research Tutor for Art, Design and Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University.

b.shaw@shu.ac.uk

Abstract

In a pre-pandemic world, the Wolverhampton School of Art was developing a keen community of printmakers through Print Club. Taking place every Wednesday evening, students and staff from a range of subjects came together to make alongside each other. Printmaking deals in multiplicity through its physical manoeuvres, but also through its spatial relations. Doreen Massey (2005, 148) conceptualises space as ‘contemporaneous multiplicity’ which is always ‘under construction’ and embedded within material practices. The print workshop is a space of multiplicity, a product of inter-relations between people and place in which disparate trajectories co-exist. For instance, collective moments of social interaction orbit around a printing press, offering opportunity to observe and learn from the experience of others, to follow or find alternative means of expression.

In a period of immense spatial upheaval initiated by the pandemic, the relationship between public and private space; virtual and actual spaces blurred. Within Higher Education (HE), the shift to online delivery particularly impacted arts subjects. With the closure of studios and specialist workshops, a ‘hybrid model’ of teaching and learning was swiftly adopted, attempting to replicate humanistic practices in digital spaces. Concerned with the theorisation of hybridity away from corporatisation, our experiences of teaching printmaking during the pandemic attempt to invoke the multiplicity and ‘risky knowledge- making endeavours’ that are ‘messy and rife with boundary crossings’ in which ontological and epistemological hybridity is formed (Wilson, 2009). This paper recalls how printmaking relations on a BA (Hons) Fine Art course have been ‘stretched out’ across space during Covid-19 and what new insights and situated knowledges have been gathered through the slow re-consolidation of the spaces-in-between.

Posting out ‘care packages’ containing key materials for making a dry point etching, collagraph plates, pre-sensitised paper for cyanotypes, matchboxes to make pinhole cameras, developing tanks and alternative recipes for developing films (ingredients which could be sourced via the online supermarket shop) invited a clash of trajectories into the domestic space. These materials carry a set of languages and practices which may seem ‘at odds’ with their final destinations - our homes and the homes of our students - in which distinct and new subjectivities would be encountered. The space of the print rooms de-territorialised from the traditional flat- bed printing presses and were re-territorialised into domestic space and kitchen tables connected not in physical space but on-line via web-cams. This space subsequently de-territorialised from the domestic and re-territorialised as the community returned to the print rooms with a changed understanding.

The social infrastructures supported by printmaking is a theme that will be crystallised through this paper drawing upon philosophies of social practice and alternative geographies to form a reappraisal of the narrative of printmaking. Expert in community development, Alison Gilchrist extrapolates an ‘edge of chaos model’ for the development of communities; “in an uncertain, turbulent world, systems operate best within an intermediate zone along the continuum, somewhere between rigidity and randomness.” (Gilchrist, 2000). This ‘in-between’ states model offers an insight into how processes of printmaking may mirror the formation of a post-pandemic community.

Bios

Laura Onions is an artist and lecturer for BA (Hons) Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. Laura has presented print-led research in national and international conferences focusing on the collective spaces of printmaking and the ways in which we support and hold onto knowledge through printed matter.

www.lauraonions.com  

Simon Harris is an artist and a senior lecturer for the BA(Hons) Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. Simon was awarded a PhD in 2016 and recent exhibition Two worlds and in between at General Practice presented a new body of paintings, prints and pinhole photography.   

www.sijharris.com 

Abstract

This proposal is for a presentation and critical reflection on a practical Teaching & Learning Project (2021-ongoing) at the University of Lincoln. It responds to the theme ‘Making Communities and Making with Communities’, specifically with regards to ‘art, places, and environment’ with an overarching aim to develop a professional studio practice and to improve use of the studio space outside formal scheduled teaching time: to create an improved studio culture.  

The European model of the atelier dominated art education from the middle ages to the 19th Century. Ateliers were predicated on a hierarchical model where a master trained apprentices. In 2021, we revived and adapted this model for studio teaching. Martin Lang and Andrew Bracey each took up a week-long residency in the MA Fine Art studios, working alongside students. These updated and short term ateliers replaced formal scheduled teaching with the aim of teaching by demonstration. Rather than formal demonstrations, students observed informally and asked questions that were of relevance to their own practices, or just of personal curiosity. There was no obligation for them to engage with us, but our presence and work was unavoidable, as we were based near the entrance to the studios. Rather than creating a purely hierarchical relationship, feedback from students reported that they felt we were more approachable, had more time to discuss artmaking, and that they viewed us more as fellow artists than teachers during this period. The mood was friendly and convivial.

While the project looked back on traditional art pedagogy, it was also forward thinking. We used a Teaching and Learning grant to purchase specialist time-lapse cameras. We then recorded ourselves throughout the residency to produce time and motion studies that were later presented to the students for discussion around the theme of ‘studio culture’. The aim was to present best practice regarding planning, organisation and productivity. This also proved to be a levelling experience, as staff were placed in the students’ position regarding access to facilities, Health & Safety barriers, and challenges making last-minute, unplanned, art materials purchases in a small provincial city. These experiences, along with the recordings, were presented back to the students and formed the basis of a critical debate that helped the students to reflect on how the studio can be used. The second stage of the project involved repeating the experiment with the students as the subjects.

The project was well-received by students and management. It is now embedded into a new module, Studio Culture on a newly revalidated programme that will start in 2022-23. This module enables students to develop a professional practice through a focus on the studio as a fundamental aspect of art education, through: working alongside staff in the studio; testing and experimenting with what possibilities the studio can bring to their practice; mounting a public open studio; critical reflection on the whole process.  

Bios

Andrew Bracey is an artist, curator and academic. He has extensive experience of teaching art over twenty years at universities including Wolverhampton University, Salford University, Manchester Metropolitan University and Liverpool John Moores University. He is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader of MA Fine Art at The University of Lincoln.

Martin Lang is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Joint Programme Leader for MA Fine Art at the University of Lincoln. He is an internationally exhibited artist (Cyprus, Portugal, and the USA) and his work has been selected for exhibition by Dexter Dalwood and Tate Curator of Photography Simon Baker. https://cargocollective.com/martinlang

Abstract

Can interdisciplinarity be a fundamental approach in developing creative communities of practice within an education setting? In this paper I will discuss how in developing the curriculum model for postgraduate students at Plymouth College of Art, I am alert to the potential offered in enabling interdisciplinarity - learning, making, reflecting, and conversing across disciplines. This is not a forced regime, but a series of regular actions and opportunities with students, staff, and specialists. It asks student to challenge their tacit knowledge and understandings of their given practice in a dialogical, open and transparent manner.

In creating the space for a cohort to explore interdisciplinarity, a balance needs to be struck between the discipline-specific knowledge and experience, and the beneficial mutuality and trust. To enable a community to be open to this experience and synthesis of different practices is not without its challenges - interdisciplinarity suggests accepting, if for a time, that there might be another way of making that is not known or understood in isolation. This disruptive methodology can be a common and shared goal, a cohesive praxis space to build a community across. This enabling space also becomes productive in extending discussions in how common ground can be found across challenging political and environmental paradigms. Students and staff are encouraged to be openly discursive and potentially attuned to examining issues beyond synthesis, the studio, or curriculum. Grant H. Kester writes in Conversations Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art;

“Artists, arguably, have the ability to comprehend and synthesise these broader interrelations because they are not limited by the technical expertise required by each specific area and thus more easily view them as interrelated parts of a larger whole. Such knowledge is less concerned with the internal operations of individual discipline than with a topographic ability to assess interconnections among various disciplines at a given time” (2013, p67).

These broader ‘interrelations’ as Kester describes enthuses the student’s confidence to coalesce around risk, challenge and precarity as a positive force in creative learning, opening up territory to do the same as a supportive postgraduate community. I will expand upon how this approach to interdisciplinarity as a methodology creates a space for a such a community to emerge.

Bio

Dr Steven Paige is Subject Leader for Postgraduate Studies, and Subject Tutor for MA Fine Art at Plymouth College of Art. His practice research incorporates installation, video, print, performance, drawing and artist publishing. He completed his AHRC 3D3 Practice Research PhD at Plymouth University in 2019.

www.stevenpaige.com

Abstract

This presentation considers:

• Partnership roles between art schools and the heritage sector.

• The potential of artists in supporting communities, more broadly, to develop deeper understanding of shared heritage, their visibility within it, therefore themselves and their role in democratising (access to) heritage.

• How artists understand the role of communities in their practice, exploring place from different creative perspectives.

Drawing upon empirical data, the presentation reflects upon:

• Creative processes that consider inclusion and access, to directly engage students with ‘audience’, ‘place’ and ‘environment’.

• The application of reverse processes to facilitate and enable creative responses that develop fresh understanding, skills, and self-knowledge.

Rising Stars is a partnership between Northumbria University and the National Trust at Seaton Delaval Hall and forms part of The Curtain Rises project. The partnership is an opportunity for the National Trust to work collaboratively with students and give them valuable experience working across a range of areas in the heritage sector. Working with Northumbria University enables the National Trust to develop its community offer.

Using the Rising Stars: Participation and Engagement case study as an example of a wider partnership encouraging openness growth and creativity, this describes the journey of Level 4 BA Fine Art students and how partnership working can be adapted to address curriculum requirements, frame delivery, and support students to develop as socially engaged practitioners and to better understand context.

The Rising Stars Participation and Engagement brief has supported and recontextualised ways to engage with place, heritage, and environment, by offering innovative, practice-led approaches that inspire audience with different ways to access heritage & culture as participants. Using a ‘Live Brief’ as a tool to enhance research skills, promote collaboration and develop transferable ‘soft skills’, this gives positive examples of students creating connections and collaborations that support employability, activate creativity and expediate ownership of learning.

Following a brief presentation, we wish to stimulate debate to further explore the role of heritage and cultural sector and academic institutions in developing approaches to art education that not only develop artistic practice, soft skills but also the confidence and capability to work with communities to support democratising heritage and culture.

• How can art schools / universities strengthen and promote cultural engagement and participation?

• How do site-specific and collaborative ways of working change perceptions and develop innovation?

• How can partnerships between art schools and heritage and cultural sector create space for students to understand the role of uncertainty and flexibility in developing their creative process and soft skills?

• How can partnerships between heritage and cultural sector and art schools explore the role of art in communities in understanding and accessing heritage and in turn provide artists in education with the experience and skills to do this?

Bios

Sarah Bradbury is a strong advocate for creative approaches to working with communities to support and develop an accessible and visible heritage and culture with multiple narratives that foster empathy and debate. Sarah is a Community and Participation Consultant at the National Trust working in the North. She is also a freelance consultant working with businesses and institutions to work with the people in their communities.

Sarah’s previous roles include, Partnerships Coordinator at Seaton Delaval Hall, National Trust. Producer (Communities) at BALTIC centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Sarah was a Fine Art Graduate from Loughborough University in 2005 and continues to use the skills she developed there in all aspects of her life.

Judy Thomas completed her practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, with her area of study concentrating on the Artist Facilitator role and collaborative practice within the context of artist- led learning programmes. She is Programme Leader for the MA Contemporary Arts and Education programme at Northumbria University. She also teaches on the BA Fine Art programme.

Her previous roles include Learning Manager at Creativity, Culture and Education, Learning Manager at Waygood and Programme Manager (Learning and Inclusion) for Liverpool Biennial. Before this she was Acting Head of Education & Public Programme for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Abstract

In April 2021 I instigated a ‘cuckoo’ residency at an old tennis club in Huddersfield. Grove Lawn Tennis Club has been on the site at Gledholt since the mid 1800’s and is home to a tennis club of dedicated amateur tennis players. I had no relationship to the club other than I walked past its green and white painted gates and suburban drystone wall surrounds to get to my place of employment or to my painting studio in Huddersfield town centre. I looked over the gates and was attracted by the look of the club, its Italian red clay courts, chain link fence, hoardings advertising sportswear brands and the community that kept it alive.

I began to make a series of large oil paintings that collected together ideas of sports brands, tennis related injuries, tennis balls, chain link fences, nets and drystone walls. These were made like banners on unstretched canvas. Over the month of May and June I produced a body of work as part of the ‘residency’ at the club and so contacted the club secretary to ask if I could work with them officially on an event and exhibition at the club. I was asked to attend a committee meeting where I presented the idea and the work I had made and at that point was invited to make the exhibition as part of the club’s annual open day and faith tea.

On the 12 July 2021 I installed the paintings onto the chain link fence that surrounds the tennis courts for the duration of the open day activities. The exhibition was titled Welcome to Broken Hand Tennis Club. The show was made with the tennis club committee and the event brought together the diverse seemingly communities of tennis club and art audience in a rare opportunity to look at paintings and watch tennis simultaneously. Revealing shared concerns with practice, the love of doing a thing – painting and tennis, and the frustrations and successes of being an ambitious amateur.

For the conference I will present this project with images of the event and a discussion on ideas in arts and sports community cross overs.

Bio

Dale Holmes is a picture painter from Barnsley who has been around a bit and now lives in Huddersfield. He is a researcher and senior lecturer in contemporary art at the University of Huddersfield and was awarded a AHRC Doctoral Studentship in 2010 leading to a PhD through Sheffield Hallam University in 2013.

Abstract

Under the banner of creating art for social change, I will present my practice led work with prisoners to co-create life stories, that by their very creation, help the prisoners move on and vision a better future. I will present creative digital stories from prisoners – some with pictures, lyric, and story, that tell a redemption narrative creatively. I will talk about my tools and techniques to co-create the stories and why they are so valuable. In creating this community of voices there is an element of activism and a desistence movement that can only be led by the community themselves – and explore my role as a former prisoner and conduit to the process.

See https://vimeo.com/stretchcharity

Bio

Carlotta Allum is a PhD student at CSM Design Against Crime Research Centre.

Abstract

In 2021 the Turner prize jury selected a shortlist consisting entirely of art collectives who work within the broad remit of socially engaged practice. This moment reflected the current zeitgeist where art that is embedded within communities or precipitates social change has wrestled the agenda away from gallery-based practices.

In Fine Art education this zeitgeist is visible within the student community actively embracing socially engaged, collaborative and collective working, and by an increased desire within students’ graduate strategies to undertake roles that work towards social value.

At UWE, our Fine Art graduates increasingly enter careers in a broad range of fields that create social value, as much as they become practicing artists or work within the cultural sector. From community workers to therapists, teachers to social entrepreneurs, environmental activists to charity staff, our students are seeking to utilise the analytical, critical and creative skills they are taught as artists on our programme for societal benefit in the third sector and beyond.

So how do art institutions nurture and empower our students to be social changemakers?

In order to help students achieve this we need to go beyond reflecting current developments in practice within studio teaching to embrace the role professional practice pedagogy and integrated careers service support has in equipping students with the tools to understand how they can realise their ambitions in the community beyond the university.  

The Fine Arts programme at UWE actively uses this integrated model to support student social engagement. Our Professional practice modules have been designed to run as sequential developmental stages across the 3 levels to aid understanding, experience and reflection. Students are encouraged to consider the wide reaching definitions of what ‘professional practice’ can be and how transferable their skills are when doing a Fine Art degree. When completing their work experience component at level 2, for example, students can either work for an organisation or have the opportunity to create their own enterprise, business or art event. This is supported by a pedagogical approach recognising that many students do not wish to continue to practice art after graduation. This equips students to make a creative contribution to society within a broad range of roles.

Embedding Careers Service delivery within our Professional Practice modules enables our students to better understand how their skills can create social value. As well as providing live employment and volunteering opportunities, the university have a number of financial schemes – from community grants to enterprise scholarships to paid undergraduate and graduate internships - that facilitate students to create bridges towards developing creative social practice and entrepreneurship beyond their academic study.

Our presentation will draw on statistical data and student case studies to demonstrate how the integration of professional practice pedagogy that recognises the diversity of Fine Art graduate destinations and integrating proactive Careers Service support structures can assist Fine Art students to become creative agents for social value across a broad spectrum of careers.

Bios

Sophie Hayes is an artist and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at UWE, Bristol, where her role includes Admissions Tutor for Fine Arts. Using photography and moving image, her work often exists within the guise of the document, but explores how and where a location or idea slips beyond the seemingly familiar. She is a member of UWE's Document & Location Research Group. 

https://www.sophiehayes.net

http://www.documentandlocation.org

Simon Morrissey is associate professor at UWE, Bristol. He is a curator and the Director of Foreground. His practice responds to people and place as the generators for curatorial and social projects. He is also the founder & convenor of the Document and Location research group at UWE, which investigates place and its interpretation through different disciplines.

www.foregroundprojects.org.uk

http://www.documentandlocation.org

Abstract

How can we create balanced eco-systems that feed the needs of arts education staff and students in sustainable ways?

Validating life wide education, learning and experience through the UNESCO Cross Cutting Competencies for Educational Sustainability Development.

Target 4.3 of UNESCO’s Educational Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) addresses specifically equity in higher education, aiming by 2030, to “ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university.”

REBEL (Recognition of Experience Based Education and Learning) is an educational toolkit designed to help both the student and the teacher or facilitator to develop a detailed language to talk about and describe capabilities and strengths, to support individuals or groups with reflection and the evaluation of their learning gained from activities and projects outside of the formal classroom. This is a toolkit for reflection, evaluation and planning that forefronts transversal competencies; reinforcing process and active participation as the route to personal learning. The session will share this tool and outline our approach to embedding it with competency frameworks that enable learning mobility and transition.

Joining us at a point in our work in progress of our own development of curricula eco-systems, the aim is to provoke individual and group response to the challenge of bringing sustainability to the core of curriculum development through interpretation and application of the UNESCO cross cutting competencies for educational sustainable development: Systems Thinking, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Anticipatory, Self-Awareness, Participatory, Normative, Strategic, Integrated Problem Solving.

Bios

Story-telling and story-making is a thematic preoccupation in the ubiquitous nature of Fred Meller's work. She is UAL lead on Shared Campus curriculum ecosystems leading the development of a framework for Work and Experience Based Learning in Art Design and Performance for which she's nominated for a National Teaching Fellowship.

Paul Haywood is the Dean of Academic Programmes for Art and Performance at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He is UAL lead for and an active member of the Shared Campus Management Group, an international platform for co-operation in HE Art and Design. As a practitioner he has a range of approaches to the use of creative methods of community engagements and the recognition of informal learning.

Abstract

Art and Community has had a both resonant and troubled history, which returns to us in various guises, to inform educational practice, whether it be ‘community art’; ‘relational aesthetics’; art as social practice; ‘socially engaged art’ or the ‘provenance’ of recent Turner prize winners and how they bear any relation at all to ‘art education’ as ‘we’ know it. This presentation will explore, with some reference to past histories* and a little bit of philosophical ‘mind-bending’** how art education and art practice may, importantly, usefully and for many reasons, including social justice, actually ‘trouble’ conventions of ‘community’ and set them on another footing. • *E.g. Matarasso, F (2019) A restless art-how participation won, and why it matters Central Books. • **The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has throughout his work sought to ‘unravel’ ‘community’ for the sake of a different sense of ‘being-in-common’. This latter sense importantly, through art and literature remains an ‘open question’, subject to constant revision, as opposed to that which is subject to the ‘laws’ of ‘making a common property’ of community.

Bio

Jenny Walden has worked in Art and Design Education in HE for many years, whilst latterly being an Associate Dean in a Faculty of Technology as an exercise in transferable skills! She is an active member of NAFAE with a strong wish to help sustain the benefits of subject associations.

Abstract

The Feral Art School was set up in July 2018 in response to the decimation of Hull School of Art and Design by its FE college owner, as the result of a financial crisis. The decision to dismantle an historic, financially-viable art school whose presence in the city of Hull since 1861 provided high quality art education, and to make its body of staff redundant, left only a skeleton provision for higher education art and design. Not only did this action fail to improve the financial situation of the FE college, but it reflected a financially-focused business attitude towards creative learning that has become increasingly prevalent in higher education policy-making in the UK (McGettigan, 2013; Royal Academy, 2019; CVAN, 2021).

Four years on, The Feral Art School, a cooperative comprising former tutors and students from HSAD working with other artists in the city, has developed a countercultural response to the withdrawal of provision by setting up a model of art education based on cooperation and community. With the support of Arts Council National Lottery Project funding and of partners including a local property developer and community organisations, it has to date provided courses in painting, printmaking, drawing, textiles and photography for more than 1000 individuals from communities within the city. It also provides studio space for a professional textiles and fashion collective. It has developed a business model that includes pathways from courses to supported and independent studios, training for primary school teachers, sessions for children and parents and links with community groups including asylum seekers and those with mental health issues.  A cooperative approach to management keeps course fees as low as possible, while support from a local trust offers subsidies to individuals who are financially challenged.

The structure and programmes of The Feral Art School have developed through knowledge of context and need and can be described as practical decisions and actions based on a philosophy shared between members of the priority of education over profit. However, it is the results of interaction and community through this approach to art and design education that are proving its wider value in developing self-confidence, independence and the pursuit of creativity as an essential life force. It also exemplifies the benefits of organisational flexibility in being responsive to developments of what is essentially an ongoing action research project. 

This presentation will set the context and approach of The Feral Art School, provide case studies explaining the impact of involvement in a structured art and design community on individuals and discuss the debate relating to quality and values in which The Feral Art School is engaged with another of its partners, The Cooperative University Project.

Bio

Jackie Goodman is a Director and Founder Member of The Feral Art School, based in Hull. She has a BA(Hons) in Textile Design & Fine Art, a MEd in Collaborative Arts Practice and a PhD which researched the narrative power of domestic space. She has taught in secondary schools and sixth form colleges and lectured in critical & theoretical studies at Hull School of Art and Design, where she was Associate Dean and course leader for Journalism and Digital Media. Jackie is a member of the Cooperative University Federation Working Group, a community of education co-operatives working to develop alternative models of education and to nurture co-operative learning.

A welcoming address will be delivered by Steve Bulcock and Rebecca Court, Birmingham City University.

One of many observations on the role of the art school and creative practices in contemporary society is that it is frequently employed as a means or tool for bridging a democratic deficit. This is, of course, true of many service professions and not only the arts, but it is noticeable how many and how often practitioners working as creative authors or artists have positioned themselves in a role that can affect or enhance communed experience. My view, from personal history as the key vantage point, is that creativity and creative behaviours have an essential and dynamic function in supporting self-determination within self-defining communities.

The three key areas this theme aims to deal with is are:

• Cooperation and caring for place

• A place for art in social change

• Art, places, and environment

As a network we are primarily interested in practice and projects; in how people are producing and how educators and fine art practitioners are responding to challenge.