Ragged School Swansea 2013
This is a group exhibition of work by all those who taught into the Foundation Art and Design course at SMUWTSD during the academic year 2012/13.
Our delivery of the course encourages experimentation and introduces the basic principles of practice. We focus on process and the development of strategies for learning and developing practice, in preference to an emphasis on product. Self-knowledge and independence are developed as key to successful study and a future career.
The course supports the idea of play as a valid approach to learning at this crucial stage of students’ education.
Learning – whether by a child or by an adult – can be seen as an oscillation between play, practice and exploring… the teacher makes the space, sustains the dialogue and introduces structures, problems and evaluations.‘
(Hodgkin, R.A. (1985) Playing and Exploring, p. 46. London: Methuen)
Drawing and making are the essentials of art and design – and we define them very widely on the course.
Drawing classes range from observational drawing including life, landscape and perspective drawing, to more expressive approaches, 3D drawing with materials and drawing through processes such as mono-printing. We consider the performance of drawing, focusing on the definition as both verb and noun.
We introduce the basic principles of many making skills through workshops and projects, with an emphasis on how process and concept are visible or expressed through making, and what might be meant by skill – and how this can be applied through current and future practice.
We include writing within the definition of making – that it can be done visibly in the studio, as knitting or drawing are – and that , as with visual expressions, it is a skill to be developed through taught techniques, experimentation, application and practice.
Exhibition Projects:
Each exhibitor has produced a project brief in addition to the visual work exhibited. As lecturers our teaching practice – writing and leading projects, running workshops, drawing classes and critiques, guiding student development – is a creative process which parallels and informs our activities as makers, photographers, fine artists and designers.
Each viewer is an activator and co-creator of the work in the gallery. By offering visitors the opportunity to respond to a broad range of projects we hope to expand the possibilities of the exhibiting space and examine further the relationship of teaching to visual practice, and viewer to exhibitor.
Bella Kerr Project : Word/Pictures
1.Choose a piece of visual work – something seen in exhibition or a famous work seen in reproduction.
2. Describe it using a list of words – be as precise as you can, but also add words about what it means to you, or you read the image/object.
3. Make a piece of work from this description – you can make one major change if you wish, eg from 2D to 3D or vice versa.
4. Describe the piece of work you have made.
5. Make a piece of work from this description – you can make one major change if you wish, eg from 2D to 3D or vice versa.
6. Carry on this process for as long as you like.
7. Make something with the lists of words you have made.
Think about the relationship of the words to the visual work – sometimes we feel that words are more precise than images, which can be read in many ways – but does your interpretation of words through visual work reverse or reinforce this idea?
What does it mean to appropriate, copy, take influence, transpose, sample etc? Why would you choose to do this?
Can we analyse an image with another visual work in the way we do through words?
Download Blue Bear an example of Bella Kerr’s project for Everyone, Everything
