Libby Scarlett,
Class of 2022

Lecturer, Freelance Arts Educator, Designer and Artist 

5 miles up to the summit of the highest mountain
6 miles down to the deepest seabed

Pleasure and precarity entwined.

The film and text interventions I have created respond to the short-term and insecure working patterns I experience as an hourly-paid graphic design lecturer and freelance arts educator and worker, as is common in Higher Education and the arts. 

There is a busyness to this manner of working that allows little time for reflection, or the ability to see the bigger picture of one’s position within a system or the wider world. If one is always “on”, keeping on top of the job/s, looking ahead to when the job/s end and planning for new ones through endless applications, there is no ebb and flow, no time or space for the unexpected, for the brain to rest and take stock of the life being built around it, to be open to the inspiration I encourage my students to seek, to consider new ways of doing and being, to question, to organise and have enough energy to ask or fight for what you want and need and deserve. (Breathe).

‘…[T]he goal is no longer truth but performativity’                       (Jean-Francçois Lyotard, 1979/1984).

In contrast to the short-term, I considered vast scales of both time and space; greatly inspired by the 1950 book, A Land by archaeologist, Jaquetta Hawkes. Her poetic style switches between the micro and macro: the formation of land we walk upon and everyday life.

Words and phrases from this text have been used in the film, and inserted into the landscape of the Institute of Education, inviting those working, studying, or visiting to consider this huge, almost unfathomable bigger picture or experience their bodies in new (possibly confusing, amusing) ways. By zooming out, they aim to take one’s mind and/or body out of the Institution for a brief interlude: a pause in the performativity.

These words and phrases act in opposition to the languages and pace of work and teaching, conveyed by my zooming into the many small tasks performed in a teaching day.