GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

173 Enquire (2009:48)
174 Enquire (2008:68)
The 2008 iteration of Transitions
commissioned the contemporary artist Emma
Hart, who worked with live art and video. She
facilitated an exploration of the ‘transition’
theme while also reflecting on performances
inherent within education and how artists
might operate within a school environment.
Using low-tech audio-visual equipment
common to schools, she created a series
of live performances and projections for
the classroom.
Anna Vass says Hart’s residency and her
engagement with young people and
teachers evolved in a highly organic and
consultative way:
Emma Hart was based in a studio on site
for two months… She had specific kind of
questions and specific ways of engaging
with those pupils in order to gain reflections
on what questions they had about
primary school.
When she went into the secondary
school, she worked during lunch times
and after school in a classroom that was
designated specifically for her projects. And
that became known as “The Questions
Department”. So it was maintaining itself as
a lunch club and an after school club where
pupils could drop in and spend time and was
a place where, through conversations with
Emma and her presence on a weekly basis,
every Tuesday, some ideas evolved and the
project took shape. So it was developed in
consultation with those young people in
terms of how it materialized.
What Emma found was that there came a
point within the course of that first year,
where [she and the teachers] felt that the
nature of her time spent at the school
would start to then shift into the classroom.
The project then benefited from having
a greater number of young people and
integrating some of the students who had
been spending a lot of time with her during
their lunch periods after school…
She was encouraging the pupils to actually
consider their relationship to school and
their relationship to each other, and to their
teachers also, as conscious performance
acts. And I think in that respect, from the
outside you might see that the project
has met certain objectives, but it didn’t
necessarily stake those as part of its agenda
in the outset.
Risk-propensity:
Through one of the UK Creative Partnerships
initiatives, Whitechapel Gallery in London
was the lead institution for a collaborative
research project asking ‘In what ways does
gallery education contribute to young people’s
learning?’ 173 One of the findings was that
high school students were learning how to
experiment, collaborate, analyse and engage.
Another observation was that their schooling
contexts appeared to inhibit risk taking:
All the young people interviewed talked
about experimenting with different materials
and developing new ideas. However within
the current education climate the emphasis
on standards and assessment is foremost,
and so doing things in new ways and taking
risks is not always encouraged. Risk was an
alien concept to nearly half of the young
people interviewed, many of whom asked:
‘What do you mean by taking risks?’ 174
Tackling the theme of risk-taking in a direct
and inspiring way was the residency project
Elastic Frontiers, produced by Arnolfini, which
explored notions of frontiers, risk, failure and
success through art making integrated with
abseiling. Over a twelve-month period (2005-
2006), artist and mountain climber Dan
Shipsides worked with a group of six children
at Oldbury Court Primary School, a school
whose motto is “achieving together through
challenge, curiosity and creativity.” The project
began with climbing exercises and writing
poems about frontiers, which graduated
into ventures like scaling local churches and
cliff faces. The artist himself describes the
residency and some of its artistic outcomes as
they discovered about the worlds of climbing
and art:
They tried and explored ways of climbing
and making art using the school buildings,
surroundings areas, local climbing centre
and places out in the landscape as their
learning environments. The equipment they
used ranged from traditional art materials
to tables and chairs to specialised climbing
equipment. These processes of learning,
problem solving, taking risks and discussion
were recorded in video, photography,
drawing and writing.
An exhibition of this work was held at the
school and at Arnolfini. This included my
new climbable sculpture, ‘The Big Cheese’,
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 51