Exploring Kara Walker 'Fons Americanus' at Tate Modern, Sue Gibbons

i'd like to talk about this idea that sometimes as teachers we're frightened of getting things wrong and how we overcome the fear of getting things wrong and we organized a trip to london to see the kara walker piece at the tate modern with our year 10 students and it's a really complicated amazing piece of artwork and in my department we had a lot of discussions about about making sure that we didn't do a disservice to the artist we didn't miss things out we didn't make it superficial and so we felt it was really important that we approached it right and we started off by showing our students this short um tate shocks film called why study art which is just brilliant it's got amazing language in it really good quotes from artists and it explained everything that we wanted our students to understand before they went about what we wanted them to actually achieve from the trip so obviously this idea of seeing work firsthand but more importantly we wanted them to understand and begin to see this idea of a relationship between history philosophy politics and art and the art is not just about making pretty pictures there's so much more to it essentially we wanted them to be able to question and think for themselves so that when they were confronted with a complex piece of artwork they could actually figure it out by themselves without us having to give them the answers with lots of information before we went we explained the context of the take modern and tape written that we also went to see and we made the connection for them between the tate and tayden lyle which is the sugar and henry tate um who basically laid the foundations for the collection we wanted them to have that information so that when we introduced carl walker the artist's work we were going to see they were able to be a bit more critical about what they were seeing and understand those connections we spent some time showing them her work and showing them videos of her speaking showing some of her early films and then we gave them some information on her not late but enough to get them started there's some brilliant quotes we found all sorts of high quality work resources on the tape website that we also used and showed them um and so that when they went they were ready we also what we more importantly showed them work that influenced the piece that helped them to raise some quite interesting questions about what this piece was about so why is it a monument why is it a gift to the empire the significance of water and there's a whole range of of western artists very european white male artist that had connections um that basically kyle walker was questioning through her work we wanted them to be curious and have the knowledge to work out for themselves and also we felt it was important that we showed them how to spend time with the work so i spent some time with the work before we went on the trip i've had sketchbooks which i filled up with notes and sketches and i showed those to our students so that they could see this is how you spend time with the work you need to have thinking time you need to actually spend time being with it experiencing it thinking about it and through that then you begin to formulate your own opinion it's not a quick fix so in my sketchbooks they could see my little doodles my sketches my notes my little um kind of things where i'm figuring out what i think about it and there's quotes and questions in there so that was really helpful to see so that when they did get to um to take modern when they did go into the turbine wall they were ready um they were confident enough to really look and question what they saw and that was fantastic to see we asked them to go and spend time with the work and they had about 45 minutes to sit down on the floor in the turbine hall and sketch and draw and make notes and just basically be with the work and they really enjoyed that they all settled down and they were looking at the work they were talking to us about it they weren't really asking questions because they had the information they needed but they wanted to express their thoughts about it and i was really pleased with their response they loved it and i asked one girl who's looking a bit blank what do you think and her response was was brilliant she just said i think it's magnificent her eyes lit up you know she was really moved by the piece of work she really got it which was fantastic and the students made sketches when they were there as well so that when we came back into school they could put those up and write up the the trip in their sketchbook and write up this particular piece some of them use quotes um from kara walker as well as their own notes some of them were able to kind of write really clearly their own opinions and sort of almost this journey of of how they came to understand more about what the work was about how they could be critical about it so there's a whole range of different responses through their sketchbooks but the students words themselves are really powerful they talk about when they're in front of the work when they saw it how they figured out how they made the connections how they were moved by it or how they began to understand just this horrific history of slavery through the artwork so again that was really important and we felt that they were well prepared they'd gained what we wanted them to gain through the poo and through the trip so going back to this idea of overcoming the fear of getting it wrong i think you've just got to do it sometimes and even take the risk that sometimes it won't be perfect we made a point of seeking quality resources which really helped we use the artist's words as much as we could and so lots of quotes and lots of films of them and we wanted the students to have the confidence to question and make up their own minds which i think that they did and also every time you you explore things at least you try them you learn from the experience and next time the idea is we will do it better

Channel: NSEAD inspirations

Views: 57

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: zF6fX8S4WiA

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021