‘Re-thinking thinking in Art & Design education’: Joanne Lee to speak at symposium at UWE Bristol – 03 November 2017

Joanne Lee (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at SHU) will speak at a symposium entitled Re-thinking Thinking in Art and Design Education: thoughts on/from/with creative practice with the aim to explore the location and practice of thinking in art and design education and what it means to integrate thinking and making, theory and practice. The symposium, organised by UWE Bristol will be held at Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts on Friday 03 November 2017.

Re-thinking Thinking in Art and Design Education: thoughts on/from/with creative practice
Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts
Bristol BS1 4QA
Friday 03 November 2017
1.00PM – 5.00PM
Tickets £10; to book please see here.

The afternoon symposium examines ‘thinking’ in art education, including its relationship to, from and within arts practices. Within art and design education ‘thinking’ is formalised under a variety of labels including Visual Culture, Critical and Contextual Studies and art and design history; discrete curricula spaces such as these can give the illusion that there is an insulated space in which ‘thinking’ takes place. How can ‘thinking’ be considered more broadly? Where is ‘thinking’ located within the studio setting and what does it mean to integrate thinking and making, and theory and practice? In what ways do both writing and making extend ‘thinking’? These questions are explored through three presentations and a panel discussion.

Featured speakers:
Katy Macleod (Kingston University) – Art / Research / Critical Thinking
Jenny Rintoul (University of the West of England) – Intuitive Integration: a proposal for course design
Joanne Lee (Sheffield Institute of Art) – Forms and mobilities: making writing thinking in art and design

Joanne’s presentation, entitled Forms and mobilities: making writing thinking in art and design reflects upon the specific forms of the ‘project’ and the ‘essay’, beginning with a consideration of how the practical forms of writing and making affect what can be thought: the format, means of production, site, presentation medium, and audience all shift what is possible or permissible to think. Joanne aims to pursue a metaphor of the constellationary form in art and design, where diverse and potentially contradictory concepts are held in relation, recognising a series of spatial metaphors seeking to describe the thinking witnessed and experienced in her own teaching and research. It draws too on current ideas about the critical non-expert position in practice-based research and doctoral supervision in art and design, where rules and methods for thinking are created and developed rather than being able to apply an existing approach.

Joanne Lee is a senior lecturer in Graphic Design in the Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC). Much of her research develops through a serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of ‘essaying’ the everyday.