FEDA is the title of my autobiographical research project which is seeking to work relationally between politicised art practice and pedagogy.

FEDA is an acronym for the Further Education Development Agency, (who were my paymasters when I was teaching), and is also a descriptor for my research aim; to produce an art practice that might work as a pedagogic and politicised conduit, (a feeder or reciprocal opening), for relations between artist and audience.

For the first three years of my PhD my investigations have focused upon the effects that politics and power have on both subjective experience and the field of art education. At the beginning of my project I was concerned with two main lines of enquiry:

‘How do we, or, should we measure art education?’
and
‘How do I make and present art, that might be able to sit between pedagogy and art practice and therefore also be able to prompt both aesthetic and knowledge based outcomes?’

My first line of enquiry was concerned with critical pedagogies and my second line of enquiry was concerned with the problems of making and presenting politicised, pedagogic, art practice.

First line of enquiry problem: the conflicts in presenting art as pedagogy

I initially felt that if I was to present my work as art practice alone then it wouldn’t be working in a practically useful, shared-with-others sense. I wanted to use my art as a prompt to pedagogic working relations with others, to have it work in two ways: aesthetic and knowledge-based. But I discovered that any request I might make for responses to my work to be materialised or articulated, continually returned me to the confines of traditional pedagogic values. I realised that I was striving for an idealistic aim, because I was trying to show that while traditional education had to demand outcomes in its efforts to control and measure the knowledge industry, I believed (incorrectly), that most people would freely respond and offer outcomes if the artist/teacher/learner was genuine, open, and inviting.

The immeasurable is invaluable

I have since relinquished this desire for articulated responses to my artwork (even though they are always welcomed). I figure now that producing a useful presentation of my art, acknowledged or not, is the better option. After all, aesthetic responses are completely uncontrollable and unpredictable, and not responding in the material does not mean that a response has not occurred. Perhaps it is that as an artist, I hope a memory will remain with the viewer, or that the artwork will continue through others in some way? This brings me to the problems associated with my second line of enquiry.

Second line of enquiry

The presentation methods that I have applied (in seeking to work between art and pedagogy) have been very problematic. The dynamic disjuncture between the two areas, (material and aesthetic outcomes differ widely), has resulted in most of my presentations being formed of two parts, the art and the pedagogy. This two-part format has proved to be confusing for audiences in general. A major problem has been that it is difficult enough to produce an artwork that works, and in seeking to prompt both aesthetic and knowledge based outcomes, I have struggled, often generating conflict through misunderstanding.

My tutor suggested that it may help for me to experiment with methods of distancing my embodied voice, to cushion the raw impact of my anxiety in my performance based presentations. At this time (alongside my ongoing research practice) I was developing an awareness that I had an ever-increasing desire for a particular type of stone and dirt. This desire was consistently overwhelming, never failing to prompt visceral responses in me and yet while I had no idea where my desire was emerging from, it felt so delicious that I decided to go with it.

I had been considering an idea that excited me greatly about how I might work with my desire (to become actively involved with a pile of stones), and also to experiment with ‘distancing my embodied voice’. However, I also felt that because the focus and fuel for my work had been my subjective experiences of learning and teaching, together with the politics of art education, that I could not and should not abandon these areas of my research. I felt that there were strong connections between the varying threads but I could not articulate these feelings.

And so I proceeded to experiment, constructing a set in which to stage my encounter with the stones that were captivating me. It was a very specific image/picture (in my mind) that I needed to communicate, and after consideration I felt that the best way in which to record my encounter with the stones would be to use a video camera (although I had never even held one before).

In my first draft video recording I spoke a continual narrative about my experiences that covered of all the main issues that my work is concerned with, (subjectivity and memory, politics, pedagogy, and, class). Feedback from my tutor suggested that this narrative was confusingly wide and that perhaps I might work with separate narrative strands, each dealing with specific issues. I worked with this further producing hours of video tape, each with three narrative strands and eventually I selected and edited the version that I felt worked the best, (in both aesthetic terms and in terms of production). I have a personal preference for the first narrative of the three that I made, because the focus is upon my relations with the stones, the objects that prompted me to make the video in the first instance.
The image link titled ‘Making It...’ leads to a page that presents transcribed diaries that were noted during the making of the ‘Stones’ video.
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