Aesthetics as Transitive Processes
Creative Arts Strategies as a Catalyst for Promoting Student Health and Wellbeing
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tara Michelle Winters, Barbara Snook
According to the World Health Organisation (2018) mental illness affects more than half the population world-wide. This is a disturbing statistic by any standards. Add to that the stress of deadlines, assignments and emotional problems related to the age and stage of the student population, and it is not surprising that the role of the University lecturer is changing. Mental-health professionals point out that art students face distinct and particularly intense kinds of stress that students in many other areas of study do not. Enduring characteristics of learning (personal growth, the shift to self-authorship) and long-standing pedagogic practices (public critique, assessment) contribute to the anxieties associated with such a potentially transformative learning experience. This situation is under-researched and mostly absent from contemporary pedagogic discourse in creative arts subjects. Our paper will focus on how to use creative arts strategies to attend to this aspect of teaching, particularly with students exhibiting signs of stress. We will unpack what we mean by "creative arts strategies" and give examples that we have gathered from our colleagues in our respective departments. The aim of our work is to contribute to present understandings of student development in the creative arts with a focus on mental health and wellbeing.
Disability Aesthetics and Empathy: A Logical Fit for a Desirable Outcome, but How to Get There
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Debra Keenahan
Embodied variations defined as disabilities, are inherent in the human condition; are part of every culture; and found as a theme throughout art. The concept of Disability Aesthetics (DA) as currently formulated, focuses on aesthetic representation of corporeal differences in the visual arts. A significant intention in the development of the area of DA was to shift the valuation and social status of the disabled away from that of pariahs on the peripheries of representation. However, DA adheres to a restrictive definition of the term aesthetics anchored in the judgement of beauty. As such, despite the best of intentions, DA as currently narrowly conceptualised cannot achieve its intended social change. Rather, this work argues DA needs to explore the broader sense of aesthetics as a sensory-affective process. This work proposes a more subtle and expansive concept of DA drawing on the Critical Disability Studies (CDS) framework of disability bringing to bear contemporary understandings of aesthetics as a transactive process. Considering aesthetics as a transitive process, encouraging representation of embodied differences within a CDS framework, focusses upon the politics of identity at the site of the individual’s interactions within the social environment. Such a conceptual shift and resultant artistic applications aims to increase empathy in the viewer. This transactive approach to DA is evidenced in the artistic work of the author who has achondroplasia dwarfism. Through shifting focus to the lived experience of embodied difference I show DA is critically positioned to achieve empathy for those too long considered undesirably different.
A Supported Studio
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chloe Watfern
Supported studios are unique contexts where professional artists with intellectual disabilities are provided with practical and strategic assistance to develop their practices and exhibiting careers. This paper presents insights from an ongoing ethnographic engagement with Studio A, a leading supported studio in Sydney, Australia. Experimenting with the possibilities afforded by "thick description," it invokes a typical day at the studio as artists and staff, friends and colleagues, interact with each other and their materials. It draws upon examples of specific artists’ practices to consider how the work they create in the studio might communicate elements of their unique lived experiences to a wider public.
Using Art as a Tool for Co-theorizing in Research with Women: Implications for Action and Social Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Elizabeth Vaccaro
Art is a powerful method for research, that can be used to engage women to think critically about their own lives, identify shared sites of social injustice and vision a better future. Drawing on two community arts research projects, this paper explores using art as a tool for co-theorizing with marginalized women about social change. Through creating a "collective collage," the "Under a Magnifying Glass Study," funded through the Interdisciplinary Health Research Group, explored the experiences of health and social service use for mothers living with HIV (MLWH). Women met as a group, bringing in items to add to the collage, which resulted in a piece of artwork that enabled women to identify their shared barriers and make recommendations for social change. In 2017, the [in]visible (Women’s College Hospital, Toronto) project engaged 30 women experiencing homelessness, in two-hour ‘arts-based’ think tanks, to make recommendations for women’s housing development. Women drew, photographed, wrote and sang about their preferred housing in these workshops. The findings have been curated into an art video and the recommendations are being used in the development of two housing programs for women in Canada. These two studies use art as a catalyst for engaging women in making meaning of research data and transforming their individual stories into collective visions for social change. This paper will show the art created by women through the collaging and arts-based think-tanks, and will explore the implications of using art to involve women as co-theorizers on research projects.
