make online: rethinking practice

Book your place using access code: MAKEONLINE

How can teaching reflect the complexity and messiness of artmaking and the contexts that it’s taught within?

Join us for the next session of make online, where four artist-educators will explore how context shapes creative practice. Drawing from experiences in settings as diverse as a rural secondary school, a community of young carers, a ceramics workshop and a men’s prison, they’ll share insights from artmaking in different environments.

In teaching, it is common to strive for a formula – a tried and tested way of working that can be applied in any context at any time. However, the creative enquiry of artmaking is not predictable; it is complex, experimental and leads in many directions, sometimes all at once.

In four quick-fire, 10-minute rounds, each presenter will share methods, processes and approaches they’ve tested that consider not only the content that they teach, but the context in which they’re teaching, asking: why is art important here? 

Each speaker will give a short presentation of their work back-to-back, after which there will be time for audience questions. 

Sum Gainda

Drawing on research from her MA in Contemporary Art Practice and the development of ‘Draw in Clay: Restorative Workshop’, this presentation discusses a process-led approach to making that explores creativity beyond productivity and fixed outcomes.

Maraid McEwan

What does it mean to an artist facilitator when a method just doesn’t fit? In her presentation, Maraid explores her ‘Tracing Back’ approach, a method developed while working with young carers, which called for typical approaches to emotions and objects to be reversed.

Jessica Ostrowicz

Embracing failure can get us unstuck. Drawing on personal experiences of teaching art in prisons, Jessica will explore how failure can function as an artistic, pedagogical and philosophical practice, unsettling assumptions and creating the conditions for new forms of making, learning and understanding.

Clemency Wood

What happens when a rural state school replaces its Year 9 curriculum with an experimental, contemporary-art-informed pedagogy? Reflecting on a curriculum intervention conducted for PhD research at a school in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, this presentation covers what worked, what went wrong, what happened to students’ understanding of what art is and what next for art education.

All of our online webinars are screen-recorded. The video file is stored in Freelands’ digital archive and shared following the event in our regular newsletter. Sign up here.

Catch up with previous iterations of make online here. 

Sum Gainda is an undisciplinary artist and facilitator whose work explores the personal as political.  Through the selection of materials and process-led approaches, she uses unlearning and unmaking as creative tools to dismantle received forms and subvert dominant narratives.

Maraid McEwan is an artist, designer and creative educator working across socially engaged practice, ecological thinking and site-responsive sculpture. Her work explores how we might collectively reconnect to place, understanding ‘being’ as an embodied, relational experience shaped by landscape, community and memory. Maraid works with young people, SEN participants and communities affected by environmental change, using co-design methods to uncover collective memories and emotional connections to place.

Jessica Ostrowicz is an artist whose practice and teaching investigate the concept of home, understood not as a fixed or singular entity but as a shifting condition of care and shelter. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Supported by the Ikon Gallery and the Rothschild Foundation, she was the Artist in Residence at HMP Springhill between 2025–26 and has been teaching in prisons and secure settings for the last four years.

Clemency Wood is an artist-researcher-teacher and doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. 

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: Jessica Ostrowicz. Photo by Tod Jones courtesy of IKON Gallery.}