within a school setting. For the artist, whose projects and working practice constitute their professional identity, this process of shifting their interests towards the context of the school can be challenging. Nevertheless, the ongoing experience of Art School demonstrates that artists can occupy the space between the independence of their individual practices and the constraints that are embedded in the lived, experienced environment of a school.
The students’ role (and experience) is crucial to the unfolding of each encounter. While they are invited into the unique world of each artist’s practice, students are encouraged to become critically engaged co-producers. This means that artists and students might reciprocally influence each other in ways that have the potential to extend beyond the time they spend together. The nature of this co-production and the relationship between students and artists vary from project to project. Usually an open dynamic has been initiated through a specific moment which served as an icebreaker. I can recall a change in students’ expressions when one of the artists informed them that they were terrible at drawing, and yet that they were artists as well! Or when another artist told the students that they really should go to visit IMMA (the Irish Museum of Modern Art) because, as the people of Ireland, they owned it. I remember a moment when a student’s infant simulator cried out during a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”, its robotic cry followed by muffled laughter as we all tried to focus on the remaining period of ‘silence’.11 Or the look of astonishment and excitement on a group of students’ faces when Maria McKinney described how she made a sculpture to be placed on an Aberdeen-Angus bull using more than 7,000 artificial insemination straws woven together like a corn dolly or a St Brigid’s cross. Every project generated a moment in which the students’ expectations shifted, and in which they realised that there was potential to develop something new, something unknown and not predetermined. The group dynamics during Art School sessions often surprised teachers who sat in to observe them, as quieter students often became actively involved, and different teams of students formed as they negotiated the new activities that they were working to accomplish together. As projects often shifted outside of the classroom—incorporating corridors, gymnasiums, playing fields and other shared spaces—the students’ sense of involvement and ownership grew even stronger, as they experienced what it felt like to perform these actions with the eyes of other students and school staff upon them.
The attitude of the hosting school is also decisive in the formation of each project. As places of learning charged with delivering knowledge and assessing understanding, schools have to be organised. Learning is to be quantified and measured, and there is considerable pressure to achieve year-on-year improvement. Creativity and innovation are sincerely declared as educational values, but they are difficult to instil—let alone to measure. Projects with indeterminate outcomes are therefore both an opportunity and a challenge. The teachers, special needs assistants, principals and school staff do much to set the atmospheres for these projects; they create the time and space for them to happen, and build a mood of anticipation. This is challenging, as there is no simple procedure for schools to open their doors to processes that are not laid down in the neatly tabulated curriculum and the routines of the academic calendar: Art School projects can spill outside the classroom and take root in different parts of the school; they might draw resources in terms of the time and attention of teachers and staff; and they might activate subjects and concepts that are not easily addressed.
Curriculum—this book—is a means of continuing to evolve the collaborative research and production supported by Art School between 2014 and 2020. In each essay, a different writer approaches a distinct aspect of Art School, whether a specific set of workshops, a single artist’s work or a theme extrapolated from a cluster of projects. Along with these essays, the book includes a collection of annotated visual material which provides a glimpse of different Art School projects as they took place. Most of these images are stills taken from video that I captured while working with the artists in the schools; thus, they provide an active trace of the interaction between artists and students, as well as a sense of the school environments in which these projects took place.12 The images also present several projects that do not feature explicitly in the essays, but that formed part of Art School nonetheless.13 This intertwining of texts, images, projects, works, themes and authors reflects the collaborative working process of Art School itself.
The thirteen texts in Curriculum are as varied as the projects they discuss: some authors have responded in fiction or through dialogue, while others provide vivid contextualisation of the artists and projects. The brief given to the authors was not to document the projects in detail, but to approach them as points set along longer trajectories interweaving art, education and art education. In this way, specific encounters— actual exchanges in Irish schools—are opened up to both global and local considerations: some authors compare Art School projects to initiatives in other places (and other times), while other authors consider how these works resonate in the settings in which they were produced. Moreover, sharing the open-ended spirit of Art School itself, the authors were encouraged to approach the projects as active references rather than as finished products or as case studies that could be analysed and replicated. Considered together, these essays constitute a space of production in themselves—where new questions can emerge and resonate between writers and concepts, and where affinities among the insights gained through Art School can rise to the surface.
The book begins with Nathan O’Donnell’s essay ‘The Outline as Weapon’. O’Donnell directly confronts the unwieldy subject of art in education, discovering a means of contextualising Art School through a consideration of the artist’s outline as a structural (and structuring) device. The essay reveals the outline to be both a fragile bureaucratic artefact as well as a powerful negotiating tool for establishing complicity, depending on how it is used. The text questions the disciplinary prerequisites that are often mistakenly projected onto artists working in educational settings. Through this process, O’Donnell establishes a more nuanced perspective concerning the migration of instincts and resources that accompanies and supports this field of practice.
In ‘We Want to Learn How People Exist’, Rowan Lear delves into her own memories of school, bridging from recollections of the gymnasium (‘I once lost a long swathe of skin to a gym hall floor’) to a work developed by artist Sarah Browne in collaboration with students at Killinarden Community College. Retaining a focus on the architecture of the gym hall, Lear’s contribution considers movement, bodies, collision, injury and collaboration. Lear treats Browne’s video work How to Swim on Dry Land as a lens through which to observe the effects of order and disorder that contemporary art can have in educational settings.
Andrew Hunt’s essay ‘Image of the Self with and Amongst Others’ echoes the title of Mark O’Kelly’s residency with Transition Year students at Our Lady’s School in Terenure, Co. Dublin.14 The text highlights a series of paradoxes that emerge via a communally developed painting produced as this project’s primary outcome. By exploring how the medium of painting is reactivated as it is integrated in social and community processes, Hunt draws attention to preconceptions concerning labour, the artist’s studio and the commodification of art.
Helen Carey’s text examines independent curatorial practice through the trope of ‘the field’, charting a relationship between less certain territories and more established institutions. The essay questions how the independent curator can reveal the kinds of lived knowledge that emerge within this tension, focusing on socially engaged practice and considering how to establish projects that activate both the independent and the institutional sides of this divide. ‘In the Field’ concludes with a brief encounter with It’s Very New School (2017), an exhibition at Rua Red Arts Centre that covered four years of Art School projects.
Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s contribution, ‘Weird Science’, oscillates between the authors’ own experiences working in schools in Canada and their engagement with Maria McKinney’s workshop series Birds of Prey, developed with students at St Mary’s National School in Maynooth. The authors characterise schools as a space of ‘joy, subversion, control, kindness, chaos, bullying and friendship’, and
