Shift/Work: Developing participatory workshop models for educating contemporary artists.
Monday 2nd April 2012
Studio C02, School of Art, University of Edinburgh 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh.
RESERVE FREE TICKET with Eventbrite
Speakers
Neil Cummings – Professor of Critical Practice, Chelsea College of Art & Design | www.neilcummings.com
Dave Rushton – Institute of Local Television | localtvonline.com
Shift/Work is supported by the HEA-ADM Discipline Workshop and Seminar Series 2011-12
///Download Poster///
About
Shift/Work is an exchange between the School of Art, University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop that develops and shares open educational resources for artists and art educators. The purpose of this workshop is to enable its participants to develop their own models of collaborative practice-based learning.
Developing new sites in which art can be produced and expanding the ways in which production is supported are central to learning how to practice as an artist. To facilitate this, art education conventionally combines ‘structured’ historical and theoretical scholarship with ‘open’ practice-based learning agreements. This incoherent approach perpetuates the legacy of Romanticism, producing ‘autonomous’ auteurs rather than artist-learners. This does not prepare artists to participate in today’s artworld, a horizontally integrated network that is highly dependent upon reciprocal altruism.
Re-imagining the learning environment is key to facilitating the kinds of knowledge that artists now require. Developing an iterative action-based approach to artistic learning that is at once theoretical and practical is imperative.
Shift/Work aims to examine and reconfigure ways in which we can facilitate comprehensive workshop-based approaches to artistic production that are theoretically informed, practical and participatory. Shift/Work will facilitate new experiential knowledge, practices and tools for artists and art educators to adapt and implement.
Structure and Format
The workshop will be hosted in three studios in the School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art. It will accommodate up to 30 participants, two speakers and their facilitators. It will consist of a two and a half hour morning session and a two hour afternoon session.
The workshop would begin with two presentations – one by Neil Cummings and on by Dave Rushton – followed by two break-out sessions. A rota-based approach to curriculum design will focus attention on the workshop as a convivial means of knowledge production and distribution. Learning and exchange will be developed through ‘on-the-job training’, engaging the participants in a collective approach to learning.
Timings:
Presentations: Neil Cummings and Dave Rushton will give presentations on their considerable professional experience of workshop models in art education. Following the presentations, the two speakers and one of the workshop facilitators will then each chair a small break out group (3 groups in total).
Group Work 1: The break-out groups will examine the models presented by the speakers with the specific aim of generating a set of conditions, desires and prohibitions that would govern a workshop-based curriculum.
Feedback 1: The three groups reconvene in the main studio. The group chairs feedback the conditions, desires and prohibitions to the whole workshop. From this, the workshop iterate and agree a shared set of guidelines.
////// BREAK
Group Work 2: The break-out groups reform and use the guidelines to collectively develop a workshop model.
Feedback 2: The three groups reconvene in the main studio. Their chair presents the model and further proposes means by which it might be implemented and adapted.
Conclusions: The participants will have a holistic view of the entire process and will be in a unique position to put it to work as a means of generating their own workshop models.
Finissage: At the end of the discussion there will be a public finissage in the main studio. This will make the immediate evidence of the workshop (video footage the presentations, feedback sessions, diagrams and notes) available to staff and students in Edinburgh College of Art.
Accessibility of the workshop:
- Attendees must reserve a place on the workshop using eventbrite – eventbrite will explain the terms and conditions of participation in this free workshop. RESERVE TICKETS here http://shiftworkeca.eventbrite.com
- The studios in which the workshop will be located are on the ground floor of Edinburgh College of Art and are easily accessible.
- Attendees will require some experience of art education, either as a student or as an educator, as prior knowledge will be form a key component of the heuristic process.
- The event will be simultaneously recorded and streamed live on Bambuser to enable wider access.
- The presentations and feedback sessions of the event will be transcribed, edited and published in 2012 as part of a Shift/Work publication being produced by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
