Rebecca Twiston Davies,
Secondary School Art Teacher and Artist
Material Thinking in the Secondary School
Secondary School Art Teacher and Artist
Material Thinking in the Secondary School
‘I am building. Strata upon strata of beaten, slurped plaster….it is an oozing crust…a surging mass, approximate, exuberant...luscious and inchoate. I am finding out and beginning.’
(Phyllida Barlow, 2016)
(Phyllida Barlow, 2016)
My practice-based research responds to teaching Art and Design at secondary level in England. Through the work exhibited here, I investigate the potential of the secondary school as a site for developing embodied, material-based pedagogies, and examine what is privileged in a curriculum.
This installation includes a film of a workshop I ran, in which lower sixth students encountered common art materials, such as clay, fabric, cardboard, foil and wire. In the workshop students were encouraged to respond to a randomly selected ‘action’ and ‘form’ by allowing themselves to be led by the materials they chose to work with. A clear, free-form classroom space made possible a conceptual openness to spontaneity and the accidental; a ‘haptic playing’ (Helen Marten, 2012).
I wondered whether transformations could occur through an educational experience such as this. Themes of space, time, conditioning, the delegitimization of sculpture materials in schools, and the properties of materials in leading making, emerged in my conversations with students during and following the workshop.
In convergence, my own practice, as an artist and teacher, considers how materials might be enlivened or activated through processes of layering, accumulation and juxtaposition. The forms become literal manifestations of the physical gestures involved in their creation; squeezing, pushing, crumpling, casting, compressing and wrapping. The impression of skin on material acts as a metaphor for the embodied encounter and the accrual of tacit knowledge.
My research continues to think with and through materials, grappling with the kinds of knowledge and perception that materials-based pedagogies might produce.
This installation includes a film of a workshop I ran, in which lower sixth students encountered common art materials, such as clay, fabric, cardboard, foil and wire. In the workshop students were encouraged to respond to a randomly selected ‘action’ and ‘form’ by allowing themselves to be led by the materials they chose to work with. A clear, free-form classroom space made possible a conceptual openness to spontaneity and the accidental; a ‘haptic playing’ (Helen Marten, 2012).
I wondered whether transformations could occur through an educational experience such as this. Themes of space, time, conditioning, the delegitimization of sculpture materials in schools, and the properties of materials in leading making, emerged in my conversations with students during and following the workshop.
In convergence, my own practice, as an artist and teacher, considers how materials might be enlivened or activated through processes of layering, accumulation and juxtaposition. The forms become literal manifestations of the physical gestures involved in their creation; squeezing, pushing, crumpling, casting, compressing and wrapping. The impression of skin on material acts as a metaphor for the embodied encounter and the accrual of tacit knowledge.
My research continues to think with and through materials, grappling with the kinds of knowledge and perception that materials-based pedagogies might produce.