Welcome to CollaborArt.
This is a short course to support our work together and we want you to be involved. Our initial purpose remains the core, to develop a collaborative space between artists using creativity to make a difference. The short course will allow each of the course designers, Peter Shukie (Education Studies); Jamie Holman (Fine Art) and Siobhan Small (Art Therapy), to offer insights into their disciplines and uses of art. We will also encourage participation, generating a communal hive mind approach to the work. Key to this is our desire to allow you to engage with others and make contributions (written, spoken, visual, soundscape - your choices) about what you use art for. We hope that we will have a blend of experiences and approaches, from the established to the beginner, from the initially curious to the developed thoughts of those with much work in these areas.
To give as much detail as possible, this is the bid we wrote to receive support for the project (below). We have made an addition to this now to allow for others beyond the courses to take an interest, be involved, contribute and help shape what we do and experience. The goal is straightforward if far from simple - create a space to encourage thought and response to the question 'what is art for' from a range of thinkers, makers, scholars, and any one with a keen interest in the question.
Bid Narrative
What we hope to achieve is a collaboration between Education Studies students, Counselling (Art Therapy students) and Fine Art students to develop themes around social practice. We have had significant successes in our respected fields, of Art (Jamie Holman), Art Therapy (Siobhan Small) and Education Studies/ ITE (Dr Peter Shukie). These have included the ways in which we relocate the academic to the cultural social spaces within our community. What we would like to do is facilitate meetings between the students with a focus on creating a dialogue, and subsequently artefacts, that represent the convergence of these three areas. Our focus will coalesce around a visit with students and staff from the three courses to the Walker gallery and Tate North in Liverpool. We hope to establish the relative approaches of each course to cultural visits and allow each group to define their own benefits in terms of enrichment and purpose. This will allow us to consider ways we might work together and find commonality across the three distinct approaches. The visit will include making spaces for discussion and then creating opportunities for the students to collaborate on ideas related to the ways their disciplines entwine/ support/ develop from each other. Throughout the visit and subsequent collaborative spaces, we hope to establish ways of designing future course design modifications that allow us to enhance each course by sharing elements of each. It is intended that such enrichment will include experiences of the exhibitions, opportunities to work together and a broadening of future employment and study directions.
Please sign up for the course if interested. We welcome anyone to the online course materials. Contact peter.shukie@blackburn.ac.uk if you have any questions at a ll, we would love to hear from you.
