Kate Thackara,

Artisteacher

Turning the tables

“Today education requires new abstractions to resist the totalizing force of current cultures of economization, to counter inert professionalization and cultures of audit and promote a ‘taking care’ that facilitates the valuing of difference and divergence.”

(Dennis Atkinson, 2022: 218)

This practice-based research explores the potential of a communal art practice in stimulating new kinds of thinking about art as a space of care for self and others. During seven years of teaching art, I have worked with over one thousand students for over eleven thousand hours, in one classroom, across five tables. I have decided to exhibit these tabletops as a symbol of this experience. Whilst navigating the British neoliberal classroom, teachers and students are under more pressure than ever to explicate and perform, and therefore opportunities to exist outside specific cultural patterns can be neglected. By turning the tables on established priorities and pressures, are we able to invite care to take a seat at the table?

This body of work also seeks to expand what it might mean to be an artist teacher, challenging the often binaried relationship between artistic and pedagogical practice. I have invited others to add to these working surfaces. Each mark is a unique timestamp that signifies convening with a larger collective whole. The decorations and defacements obscure as they build up. Ephemeral in nature, this ongoing practice is pausing momentarily to be turned upright and exhibited. These living surfaces ask us to critically analyse what value we place on communal practices and how we might better value the quiet, implicit moments of conviviality and care within these communities of practice.

Atkinson, D. (2022). Pedagogies of Taking Care: Art, Pedagogy and the Gift of Otherness. Bloomsbury.