Talking About Art

Embodied knowledge, A Case Study: Thinking Through Practice. An artist and senior lecturer talks about her practice. Susan is a sculptor and Director of Fine Art Studies at a Northern University. What was formerly a college has recently earned university status. All the lecturers as a result of the upgrade have had to alter the way they think about their art practices and how they reflect on teaching practice and where the two might intersect to benefit the institution, the students and the individual. This culture change has been a slow a difficult one. My FE students are resistant to writing, which is the focus of my MPhil; possible reasons are, they just want to make art, they don’t want to write or be asked to think or spend time reflecting that could be spent making. Other reasons could be a learning barrier such as dyslexia and being on the autism spectrum. They are adults and may have dependents to care for and part time jobs that fit around study. Many art...

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...