HOW ARTISTS LEARN: A LEXICON
How Artists Learn: A Lexicon was a performance lecture performed at The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art February 2025. It was part of a programme of events for Have Some Imagination: Towards a Manifesto for Arts Education.
The lexicon emerges from approaches to tutorial and studio practice that encourage students to learn as artists, developed through experiences of curriculum design and pedagogical development in Fine Art and Performance Making contexts in higher education. The words are a consolidation of repeated strategies used to support students when they are ‘stuck’ in not knowing, unsure about what to do next. It considers how adjectives and verbs can be used to activate, energise or slow down situations for the individual needs of a student artist and their work. Although these words have emerged from a higher educational context - and originating from my experiences as a practicing artist - the lexicon can be adapted to be applied at any level of artistic and creative learning, gesturing towards what artists might need to learn to maintain agency and radicality within contexts that prioritise commodity, employability and metrics of economic value.