Artcrimes

Friday was my second day with the Art PGCE students from Northumbria University. I had booked the City Learning Centre in Washington. This will be the last time I do this because the CLCs in the City of Sunderland will not be operational after March 31st. Despite their success and their uniqueness, the local authority has decided to close them down. That is tragic for the City and tragic for those who have used these wonderful resources over the years. But we still had a great day. The morning was spent looking at how you can use contemporary art as the centre of the curriculum and still embrace more traditional methods and focus. Quite a bit of this also involved looking at examples of new media work. I also showed some of the Live Art/Performance Art work I have done with school students, which went down better than I expected. After lunch we had a practical session using equipment and techniques that they could then adapt for their placement schools. The theme was to create a photoshoot inspired by a selection of artists, Morimuri, Sawada, Sherman and Wearing. The other theme was fun of course, often missed out from the school curriculum. The small groups had to work together and negotiate who was doing what and then set it all up, record it and try to then create something using technology….so we had digital image manipulation, stop frame animation from still images, movies, calendars and live video images taken into narratives. There isn’t any doubt they found it useful but also a bit of a release from all the pressures of essays, lesson planning, worrying about the future etc. I think they are an amazing bunch of people, the future of art education might not be safe in government hands at the moment, but be assured that it is safe in the hands of these trainee teachers.