IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

During the last 15 years, Wellbeing has become a key component within the UK Adult Community Learning sector, and this has led to a growth in public demand for teaching and learning in traditional creative disciplines, such as drawing skills. I am a UK, London based, visual woman artist and educator, working in partnership with the London Museum, Stephens House & Gardens, to deliver the project ‘Art for Wellbeing’. This is a project I developed specifically for a museum classroom setting, with adult community learners in mind. My in-person presentation aims to explore how the development of skills in the traditional discipline and practice of drawing, enables individual wellbeing, within the socially engaged setting of a London community based project. As a creative practitioner, I am interested in how the art making process becomes therapeutic, without being or becoming art therapy. My presentation will show how my project ‘Art for Wellbeing’, fosters a hybrid of disciplines, taken from the fields of Fine Art, and Andragogy; the practice of teaching adult learners, to enable a teaching and learning culture which responds to site, using the traditional discipline of drawing, and socially engaged practices, as a methodology for creating knowledge. My presentation will suggest that it is through creative practice, and socially engaged teacher learner relationships, that learners and educators, artists and audiences, come together, to connect; to learn; to share; to observe and stay active. And that the museums; galleries; studios and classrooms become the site of a student’s embodied and experiential relationship with nature and each other. And through the senses and extremities, the site enables a deep engagement with therapeutic relationships, which celebrate the experience of creative practice.