Thinking, Making, and Thinking through Making

As a new workshop with schools at Tate Exchange fast approaches (Tate Modern, 16 May 2019, 12-3pm), and our collaboration with schools around the country continues to flourish, I continue to reflect of the role and significance of cross-disciplinary and creative encounters in the classroom. In 2017, I ran a workshop on Futurism [link here] in which I began to think through the practical and theoretical implications of ‘thinking through making’ rather than the more common reliance on ‘thinking through writing’. Students after studying Italian Futurism, and preparing a pop-up exhibition of Futurist artworks and texts, were asked to respond creatively to Futurist poetry by writing their own poems. ‘Writing’ did of course mean playing with typography and thinking through images as well as words.

In 2018, together with Dr Ruth Hemus, an expert of Dada based at Royal Holloway University of London, the workshop at Tate continued to test the role and effectiveness of creative making as a tool for engaging students and supporting critically aware learning [link here]. We chose collage as this technique was used to great effect by Dada and allowed us to incorporate the imagery created by both Italian Futurism and Dada in response to WW1. The results were striking, playful, and acutely observed responses to the imagery of the two movements. The subversive nature of both movements and their opposite politics were captured by students and participants in wonderfully creative and irreverent images.

Our call for working across disciplines is not a stance against disciplinary specificity. Subject knowledge remains key and is the basis from which we ask all our participants to respond to the visual and textual prompts we send in advance of the workshops. Students study independently; come together in their schools in small groups to discuss their findings; and write short texts for an exhibition catalogue which is designed and produced by the Design department of The Sixth Form College Farnborough (one of our longstanding key partners in the project). On the day of the workshop, we meet at Tate and we are joined by students from all participating schools (and gallery visitors). Meeting, discussing and creating together offers a different mode of thinking and learning because it is embodied. The space at Tate Exchange is made for feeling, doing and making. It is not a traditional classroom, nor is it a traditional gallery or museum space (with its implicit barrier to a haptic experience).

We hope to see you on 16^th May at Tate Exchange for a full day of activities to explore our 2019 theme: ‘Women of the Avant-garde and neo Avant-garde: Activism and Dissent’. Whilst 12-3pm will be devoted to our workshop with schools, 3-6pm is open to all. Joins us in a conversation on activism and bring your own text/image/object for our pop-up exhibition.