make online: looking, thinking, making

How and when do we learn how to look? What skills are required to translate looking into understanding, and how does this connect with the material literacy required in making?

In our upcoming session of make online, we will hear from three artist educators about their unique approaches to looking and making in a variety of educational contexts and mediums. We will explore how visual literacy, or learning how to look, can help foster a critical understanding of the visual world, and how the material literacy of making can enable critical responses to it.

This session will feature three artist-educators presenting their work back-to-back, followed by an in-conversation with Freelands Foundation Education Curator Nathan Marsh and a Q&A.

Nicola McCaffrey

Nicola McCaffrey will present her research on developing visual literacy in the primary classroom, including her own scheme of ‘slow looking’. Through her research, Nicola has developed a critical discussion of various schemes used practically in an art classroom in South London, where such schemes are often inaccessible due to children’s socio-economic status and early language exposure. Nicola will discuss her own scheme and its intervention in the understanding of images through a slowing of looking.

Richard Austin (Be Creative Cornwall)

Richard Austin from Be Creative Cornwall, an alternative provision for students who have struggled in traditional school settings, will discuss their simple creative sculptural methodology to engage students of all ages. Their process builds self-esteem and a sense of achievement; in just a few hours students who had never touched clay before are creating unique and thought-provoking pieces of sculpture.

Amy Leung

In this short presentation, Amy will share two school-gallery-artist projects that she has been involved in: Growing Together with Studio Voltaire and Heathbrook Primary School and Dreamscape with Camden Art Centre and Anson Primary School. She will draw out themes of relationship-building, acts of dreaming, resistance/complicity as materials and the significance of these projects within contemporary art institutions. 

Nicola McCaffrey is an art specialist teacher in a primary school in South London. Trained in early years, she also holds an MA in Art and Design in Education from UCL and a PGCert from Leeds University in Teacher’s Research and Practice.

Richard Austin is a sculptor who produced his first life-size figurative commission in 1986. Since then, he has produced over 500 pieces of both figurative and abstract works. After being diagnosed as high-functioning neurodivergent in 2017, he turned his attention to teaching and, along with his daughter Emma, started Be Creative Cornwall.

Amy Leung is a London-based artist who works with children and young people in museums, galleries and schools. Together they make sculptures, drawings and spaces. Amy has previously worked with schools, families and communities on projects at Camden Art Centre, the Royal Academy, South London Gallery and Towner Eastbourne. She has a MA in Art and Design in Education from the Institute of Education, UCL.

make online is an international online forum for artist-teachers to share tools, skills and ideas.  
 
Every half-term, contributors showcase to their peers an innovative idea or approach from their practice; from resources that have sparked new responses in the classroom, to practical demonstrations of exercises and techniques, to snapshots of works-in-progress. 
 
Intended as a practical exchange of skills and knowledge, make online encourages playfulness and experimentation and prioritises process over outcome. 
 
The series extends the work of the make residencies held in 2021 and 2022, which brought together artist-teachers working in different contexts across the UK to exchange ideas and practices through a series of process-driven workshops.

^{Image: Eric Aydin-Barberini.}