Conversation Pieces

07/08/2009 by James.

I am continuing to read Conversation Pieces by Grant Kester at the moment (Uni of California Press), excited by the language and the confidence that the writing gives me to further develop and share my ideas on socially engaged practice.

I have been exploring recently (see the last post) how I can better articulate the relationship between art and learning and continue my research in the role of the arts within education.

Kester brings together examples of projects and theories that begin to provide a structure for holding and presenting such dialogical work and the research surrounding it.

Although the work that I am part of through 5×5x5=creativity is generally framed as a creative learning/educational project in which artists play the role of facilitators, I see no reason why it shouldn’t also be framed and shared as a series of socially engaged, dialogical artworks which take place within an educational context.

My art has never been about having the right answer, or claiming to know a truth that needs to be represented and shared, it has always sought to set up some kind of exchange and dialogue.

What Conversation Pieces does is to allow me to continue to construct a ‘home’ for my practice, a base from which to go back ‘out there’ and keep practicing as an artist who is fascinated by the potential for positive environmental and social change that comes from embedding dialogical arts practice within educational and community contexts.

‘In dialogical practice the artist, whose perceptions are informed by his or her own training, past projects and lived experience, comes into a given site or community characterized by its own unique constellation of social and economic forces, personalities and traditions. In the exchange that follows, both the artist and his/her collaborators will have their existing perceptions challenged…What emerges is a new set of insights, generated at the intersection of both perspectives and catalyzed through the collaborative production of a given project.’

Grant Kester

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