Creative Journeys
Jagiellonian University
Managing and Creating Art Projects For Seniors: A Critical Reflection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kok Wai Benny Lim
There is a global trend toward an ageing population, which is caused by two interdependent phenomena: advances in medical science and declining birth rates. Policymakers, healthcare professionals, social workers, and even academics have in recent years look into the issues brought about by this trend. To promote active ageing, seniors are encouraged to participate in a variety of activities, including arts participation. Art for seniors can be viewed from two perspectives: seniors could either be active audience or active participants in the creative process. This research is interested in the latter and has explored the following issues: (1) crucial factors to consider when engaging seniors to participate in art projects; (2) power dynamics between community artists/practitioners and senior participants in the creative process; and (3) the actual changes and evaluation methods. In addition, the paper devotes a section on how seniors deal with the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. To address the aforementioned issues, it is essential to hear firsthand accounts from seniors and community arts practitioners and scholars. And hence, the research adopts a multi-method approach, including two search conferences on the topic of art and social change in 2021 and 2022, participant observation of a two-month rehearsal process for an art project involving seniors as artists, as well as three intimate focus groups comprised of seniors who have actively participated in the arts.
Exploring the Material; Exploring Life: The Experimental Processes and Materials of Women Artists at Black Mountain College of North Carolina (1933-1957) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Siu Challons-Lipton
During a time of Nazism and Stalinism in Europe, McCarthyism in the USA, and Jim Crow laws in the South, Black Mountain College of North Carolina (1933-1957) encouraged educational and artistic experimentation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the fostering of individuality. The content of its arts curriculum was a study of the elements of form, its method, one of discovery and invention, with a goal of seeing and perceiving. Students and faculty were becoming thoughtful, curious, questioning individuals, who were not afraid to fail. They were a part of the experiment, a shared journey to create a more caring and inclusive world, regardless of sex, religion, or ethnicity. The practice of the arts was a way of life. Within this college, many increasingly acclaimed women artists were given the opportunity to explore and revolutionize their craft in a manner unconventional for the restrictive, often misogynistic attitudes towards women of the time. Women like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, M.C. Richards, Hazel Larsen Archer, Karen Karnes, Susann Weil, Elaine De Kooning and Alma Stone Williams were given a space to create, educate, and learn. From Anni Albers’ constant evolution of weaving from craft to fine art to M.C. Richard’s synthesis of poetry and pottery, this paper investigates the submerged history of women not just as artists, but as educators, revolutionaries of their craft, social activists, vital to any study of Art history and a liberal arts education.
Handicrafts in the Realm of Rural Ethnicity: Tales of Rural Women Artisans from Sind, Pakistan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Faiqa Jalal
Culture in the province of interior Sind of Pakistan is rich with local artisans having tremendous skills to produce crafts as part of their everyday lives. Sind has always been appreciated for textiles, pottery, clay, carved furniture etc, but due to lack of documentation of numerous craft skills, most underdeveloped villages do not get opportunity to showcase their handicrafts to the masses. The purpose of the project is to document and identify challenges of financial sustainability of rural women artisans of the province of Sind and their collaboration with designers through middlemen. The research identifies these women seeking formal training in order to evolve themselves in today's modern contemporary design era. For better economic stability, these women artisans have felt the urge to independently communicate with different private organisations and designers, by co-designing through recycling and reusing their already made crafts. The research uses qualitative methods involving primary and secondary sources by documenting economic and environmental hardships, local women of interior Sind face that reflect upon the crafts they produce.
Mapping the Body in Place: Exploring Our Connection to the Natural Environment View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chloe Watfern, Katherine Boydell
Within the traced outline of a body on a piece of cloth or paper all kinds of knowledge can be expressed and created about human experience. We have used body mapping across many different scholarly projects at the Black Dog Institute, Australia’s leading mental health research institute. In this paper we unpack the ontological dilemma that our bodies present when researching the self in the world. As scholars with a commitment to social and ecological justice, who understand individual mental health and wellbeing to be fundamentally intertwined with community and planetary wellbeing, what role should our skin-bound bodies play? Through the lens of a recent project with children and their caregivers, who made family body maps articulating their feelings in and about the natural environment, we unpack the tensions involved in situating this experience within and around the human form. We demonstrate the value to participants of returning to this body, in this place, at this moment in time. We also show how, through choice of materials and careful facilitation, the skin-bound body becomes porous and interconnected.
