Reading Group #16 | Studio as Pedagogy

How can viewing the artist’s studio as a pedagogical framework support artists’ learning and the teaching of art?

Led by artist, curator and educator Andrew Bracey, our next Reading Group considers the role of the studio in arts education through three short texts.

Excerpts from The Studio Reader offers several artists’ perspectives on the concept, site and activity of the studio, whilst artist Elizabeth Price’s ‘Excerpt from sidekick’ gives an insight into an individual studio practice and the conditions of production that define it. Finally, we’ll explore the studio as a learning environment in a text from scholars Susan Orr and Alison Shreeve, who advocate for studio-based learning as part of what they call ‘sticky’ art school curricula.  

Find the reading materials here.

• Excerpts from Susan Orr and Alison Shreeve, Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017, pp.90–91 & pp.5–7.  
• Elizabeth Price, ‘Excerpts from sidekick’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 2002, 2:1-2, pp.108-112.  
• Charline von Heyl, Marjorie Welish, Rachel Harrison and David Reed, The Studio Reader, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp.119–120, 125, 169, 217.

Date and time: Monday 13 July 2026, 6.30–8pm 

Address:
Freelands Foundation  
12 Errol Street  
London, EC1Y 8LX  

The event is free and open to all, but capacity is limited, and places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Register your place here.

The materials will be shared with all those who register. Please note that reading the texts in advance is encouraged, however not mandatory.

Andrew Bracey is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln and a co-founder of Smatterings, a collective of artist-lecturers exploring speculative making, tacit knowledge, collaboration and ‘not-knowing’ in the pedagogic value of the studio. Andrew has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions including Manchester Art Gallery; Firstsite, Colchester; Transition Gallery London; Nottingham Castle; and the Usher Gallery, Lincoln. He has published writing in journals and edited collections including Journal of Contemporary Painting; Journal of Artistic Research; TEXTILE; and Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life (Intellect). His PhD by Practice developed the concept of mutualist appropriation art, examining how painters make and write from within studio practice as a form of embodied knowledge production. His current research focuses on making‑looking, rummaging in archives, the painter writer and studio-ing.

^{Image: Toby Rainbird at University of Brighton, Freelands Studio Fellowship 2025 (still). Filmed and edited by Tom Thistlethwaite.}