Fine Art as a Life Practice: Lessons from PGR teaching under COVID-19

Abstract

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, Higher Education fine art arts educators were compelled to re-think their studio teaching methods. As a PGR instructor new to teaching, I took this as an opportunity to enter into a curious and creative inquiry with my first-year students into the pandemic situation itself, through a project titled: ‘Engaging, Encountering, and Distancing: Masks, Masking, Masquerading’. This article draws on my reflexive research conducted throughout my first term teaching in the School of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural and Media Studies, at the University of Leeds. My students were supported to think of themselves as context-specific artist researchers, gaining experience of social and visual research, to engage in haptic experiments with materials, to investigate their immediate habitat, and to make new work mediated by the online environment. The project encouraged students to attend to the affective, making conscious modes of relating and having presence online, searching for new ways to create a sense of being with and relating to each other. As a consequence of teaching online, I came to question what is specific about the pedagogical premise and methods of fine art teaching, with an emphasis on ‘the studio’ as a making and relational space, and the importance placed on embodiment in the student/lecturer relationship and learning experience of 1-2-1 tutor/student tutorials, and studio group crits. Whilst fine art lecturers are relieved to be back in the physical studio, teaching under COVID-19 has enabled us to appreciate the specificities of a fine art pedagogy and its social importance, and to value a fine art education as a life practice.

My article concludes with thoughts on the significance of ‘the studio’ as a pedagogical tool of fine art, and the importance of embodiment in the student/lecturer relationship and learning experience overall.