Talking About Art

Andy’s Story. Embodied Practice in the Pottery Workshop Bobs Village Gallery in Wisdom, North Carolingan   is a production pottery. It is a small factory making craft pottery by hand. A craft industry, in this case it is run by Bob and his wife Molly. Ellen Dean and a few other employees take care of the duties in the gallery and the pottery workshop. Bob and Ellen work together six days a week, eight hours a day. That is the kind of dedication a craft practice takes. He had a pottery wheel, a Shimpo and sits in the workshop window throwing pots. It is a practice, a labour and it is really hard, dirty, cramp-inducing work. Ellen puts handles on, fires up the bisque kiln, loads the glaze kiln, tends the gas kiln, glazes pots for orders and helps in the gallery packing pots to ship out to galleries. See post https://talkingaboutartmphil.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-story-of-handle-man-why-practice.html for other stories about embodied practice. This summer they have an appre...

From Fishtown to Gimmerton, Education as a Social Mobility or The Tale of Boreas, a case study. Boreas is a young man, sensitive, quietly spoken and shy. One of our Non-Traditional students from a white working class broken home in coastal Fishtown, a depressed post-industrial area of the Northern coast line. There is high unemployment and few opportunities in Fishtown and so after an uneventful and unheroic schooling with few aspirations Boreas moved to Gimmerton. He is a softly spoken gentle soul that life ‘happens to’ rather than having any agency of his own, or that was the case at the beginning of the Access course. Boreas’ issues run deep, abandoned by his Dad, left in the care of a step parent, he drifted and turned to drink and recreational drugs. The cat’s eye glimmer in the road to change was community education and night classes in Gimmerton. Being in a new town away from detrimental influences he was able to switch paths. Without inspiration and encourageme...