Play Sense: Talking

About

Play Sense is an exhibition, series of performative workshops and a symposium exploring connections between learning and documentation focusing on the idea of ‘aesthetic education’. The title is taken from Friedrich Schiller’s ‘On the Aesthetic Education of Man’ (1775). Play Sense explores the value of learning through doing and how materials lead experience can be represented through image and text.

Play Sense: Talking

Symposium Sat 23 May, 1:30–6 p.m.                                                                                  at Gerald Moore Gallery, Mottingham, SE9 4RW

FREE EVENT

Book a place @ bookwhen.com/geraldmooregallery

Matthew Cornford, Annie Davey, Ralph Dorey,

Dean Kenning, Tara Page, Florian Roithmayr

Play Sense: talking brings together artists and researchers that explore the knotted seams between learning, experience, image, object, language. This event seeks to explore how we can operate between the act of learning and recording learning, as artists, students, teachers…

The dictionary is an object that performs an authoritative and objective role, cataloguing the meaning of words:

Document • n. A piece of written, printed or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record. • v. Record in written, photographic or other form. ORIGIN ME: from OFr. from L. Documentum ‘lesson, proof’, (in med. L. ‘written instruction, official paper’), from docere ‘teach’.

In relation to art and learning, the term document could imply the use of methodologies that privilege evidence, objectivity and accountability for the sake of attainment or competition. In this notional diagram between art, education and documents can we shift the dynamic of power away from the end result, the need for objective proof?

Documents are processes coagulated into aesthetic moments; they are traces and creases left behind or made through habit. Documents can be read, seen or held. But the translation from experience to image/object can occur with low fidelity. Some things are lost and others gained. This resistance can transform the document from fact and evidence into a catalyst for fiction and criticality.

As artists, researchers, educators how do we deal with the requirement to record and present learning, especially as these processes can be fluid, latent, invisible? Can experimental or materials-lead approaches offer alternative forms of knowledge; countering the clarity and speed of text? How are learning experiences documented, represented, aesthetized, valued, communicated? And, can experimental approaches resist being flattened or inscribed back into history or convention?

Speakers are invited to explore connections between art, learning processes and documents from their individual perspectives.

Matthew Cornford is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton, where he leads the BA (Hons) Fine Art Critical Practice course. Matthew collaborates with David Cross as Cornford & Cross. In addition he is working with John Beck on a research project to document the sites of former art schools.

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/matthew-cornford  

http://www.cornfordandcross.com/

Annie Davey is an artist and lecturer presently teaching on the MA Art and Design in Education programme at the UCL Institute of Education, where she is undertaking her PHD.

http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/89181.html

http://spaceinbetween.co.uk/exhibited-artists/annie-davey/

Ralph Dorey is an artist and teacher who operates under Sender Brocken and as part of AAS.

http://www.ralphdorey.co.uk/

http://www.senderbrocken.co.uk/

http://aasgroup.net/

Dean Kenning is an artist and writer. Dean currently teaches on BA Fine Art and MRes Art & Philosophy at Central Saint Martins and is Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University.

http://www.deankenning.com/art.html

http://fada.kingston.ac.uk/staff/view_staff.php?id=72

Tara Page is an artist researcher teacher and Head of the MA Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practices (MAAT) at Goldsmiths University of London.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/educational-studies/staff/page/

Florian Roithmayr is an artist with recent solo exhibitions at: MOT International, Brussels; Site Gallery, Sheffield; and Treignac Project, France.

http://www.motinternational.com/artists/florian-roithmayr/

http://www.sitegallery.org/archives/6661

Play Sense is kindly supported by Arts Council England.

Play Sense is a Fay Nicolson projec, in collaboration with Gerald Moore Gallery