Talking About Art

Practice as Research; Thinking Through Theory “Practice as research not only produces knowledge that may be applied in multiple contexts, but also has the capacity to promote a more profound understanding of how knowledge is revealed, acquired and expressed.” (Barrett and Bolt, 2007). Art practice, being a craftsperson, a chef, a coder, a writer, a landscape gardener or equally a teacher creates tacit knowledge, as Hyland, (2018) puts it, a thinking hand. Practice led  research has the possibility to extend understanding of the role of experiential, problem-based learning ( Barrett and Bolt, 2003) and there is real potential for situated knowledge and personally motivated understandings that could demonstrate how knowledge is revealed and acquired. This practice led research gives the participant when they reflected upon it, a deeper way of knowing and an illumination of the winding path of understanding of how it is that they know what they know, Barrett and Bolt (...

The Story of the Handle Man:  Why practice based research? As a student of ceramics in the 1980’s we had a field trip around a pottery factory in Stoke on Trent. The ceramics industry was in terminal decline, yet in Stoke, the majority of the jobs were in the potteries and peripheral industries serving the factories. To such an extent that the whole of Stoke had Potters Holiday in June, the whole place closed down. In this factory we saw skilled mould makers, arcane jigger and jollying work making dishes, expert engravers cutting copper plates to print willow pattern from, women whose sole job was banding 24 ct gold on the rims of flatware. What most fascinated me was the handle man. Standing in front of an 8 foot rotating rack full of teacups, he unhinged a plaster mould, popped out a dozen or so cast, green, handles and attached them to the teacups so precisely, so neatly, so perfectly and so fast that after every twelve handles he gave himself the treat of ...

Measurability and The story of the man who smiled The story I want to tell you about a craft class I taught in a local Care Home where we would engage one morning a week with sessions on sewing, drawing, pastels, still life, working from memory photos from the 1930’s and 40’s, and even paper making. It was a shifting population and residents moved in for assessment and out back home or into residential care. All the projects had to be completed in one lesson. Some students I had every week. One old gentleman in particular, very nicely turned out but who never spoke and often looked depressed and sad. And he would need huge amounts of encouragement to attempt the crafts each week.   Always crumpled his work up and threw it in the bin at the end of each session. One week I had decided to do a Georges Braques (1882-1963) themed still life and being a fiddle player, I have a violin which I brought in and set up with some sheet music and a music stand in a still life...

The Provocation, The Manifesto The Bold Statement “ We want to demolish museums and libraries,  fight ... all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice” .  Marianetti 1909 Hargreaves in Brown (2002) states we need to dismantle and reconstruct the old institutions - a little like Marinetti and his fellow Futurists,  … the traditional educational system, Hargreaves believes must be replaced with a polymorphic education provision, an infinite variety of multiple forms of teaching and learning. - Bold indeed. Zing Tummm. ‘All schools should be art schools.’ This was the call from artist Bob & Roberta Smith when he stood against Michael Gove at the General Election in May 2015, in protest against what he termed the Coalition’s devaluation of arts education. Whether or not you agree with his manifesto, a Turner Prize nominee running against a former Education Secretary gives us some idea of how politicised the future of the arts in ou...

Tarzan and Helen Keller I’m thinking about Tarzan (Rice Burrows, 1912)   how Rice Burrows gives him an introduction to the written word aged 10 having no context, language, visual language, never having heard human words or seen them written down, not hearing, speaking or reading language. Tarzan finds alphabets and primers intended for himself but lost in a jungle cabin and discovered a decade later by the curious child Tarzan, who tries to pick the drawings off the page and thinks words are bugs. P48, ‘of course he had never before seen print, or ever had spoken with any living thing which had the remotest idea that such a thing as a written language existed, nor ever had he seen anyone reading’ (Rice Burrows, 1912, p50) ‘his little face was tense in study, for he had partially grasped, in a hazy nebulous way, the rudiments of a thought which was destined to prove the key and the solution to the puzzling problem of the strange little bugs (writing)’ p56 It was a ...

Creating a Community of Inquiry What is a community of inquiry? Lipman 2003, Biesta 2014 and Dewey 1934 believe it is a conceptual investigation into problematic situations. My problematic situation?   The FE Art courses I teach have both practical art and theoretical contextual studies elements, the conflation causes the problem. Students come to art school because they are practically interested in making art and are indisposed and resistant to writing and committing themselves to paper. Why is this? Research hopes to investigate how writing culture is currently viewed. To this end a reflective diary project has been established with 29 participants, in addition participants may also join a book club, interviews and critical incidence will be recorded with the intention of discovering some of the themes and threads, indicating possible issues, hindrances and hang-ups to written success? Does the concern lie in student expectations not being met or learni...

My Story of Resistance:   What Happened to a Human Being?  part 1. I was a dyslexic child of the 1970’s. In Primary school I was considered a slow learner, Dr Gavin (2013) in her report states that dyslexia is a learning disability that makes it hard to learn to read and understand written language. Heresay tells that the local council ignored childhood dyslexia in the 1970’s because of cost implications, this is upheld by a more recent document stating that the city council does not, even now, employ any dyslexia support staff for school children (Moor, 2012).  I was in my own dream world, in my imagination. I had no idea what teachers were talking about most of the time, there was an incomprehensible element to each days tasks which seemed to make perfect sense to the other children, I was amazed at their abilities to so readily comprehend when I found it so baffling.  The other children seemed to 'get it', to intuitively know what was ...

The Reluctant Writer Kratos is the most resistant person in the reading group. She loves reading and all her life she has written at school, in exams, in work documents and has been excellent at it, but now she is unwilling. She has only agreed to write the diaries in honour of our long standing friendship and mutual respect.   However despite being intractable at first and not writing any entries for the first month, she has begun, and says she enjoys it and has even agreed to write the education journey. At book club 3 Kratos talked about the experience of hearing My Story of Resistance saying she was inspired to take up the pen and write her own story, her own education journey. Kratos was truculent about writing, only doing it to ‘please’ me, which is good evidence for the MPhil project but bad in that she is not doing what she wants to do. Having known Kratos for a decade I can tell you that she never ever does anything she doesn’t want to do. Possibly on so...

Chapter 1:  Anthony the Croupier Barriers to Success for Adult Learners. The problem.  Anthony is a croupier taking bets seven nights a week in a local casino. Supporting a young family and elderly parents. He has a couple of vocational qualifications in catering and food hygiene but he is also a very talented and as yet untrained artist. His heartfelt desire is to go to art school and university. So he applies for and is accepted onto the level 2 diploma in art and design.  He excels at illustration and Graphic Design and is good at speaking about art, has opinions and joins class debates. He realises he has a stark choice to make, that of a well-paid career in five years time (after graduation) in a graphic design company or back to the Roulette wheels. This choice rests on a resistance to reading and writing, a fear of failure, past catastrophe and defeat haunting him, blocking his ability to succeed, or even ask for help as well or because o...

Talking About Art:  Critical Thinking about Art and Design. What can Practice Focused Research Reveal About Critical Thinking in an FE Art and Design Institution, That can’t be Discovered  by Other Modes of Enquiry? This Blog is to track my progress through an MPhil in art education 2018-2020  at a Northern University.