Perspectives on creative arts in higher education
Editors are many things: mythological tinkers, invisible menders, midwives coaxing the progeny of others into the world. We are the bridge between the artist’s chaos and all that is logical and right.
Museums and galleries are places of world-making. They document, display, and interpret artefacts deemed worthy of our attention, objects considered significant for collection and preservation. Such objects are carefully staged to relay certain stories, while other stories are concealed by their absence … it is no surprise that museums and galleries, at least historically, have intentionally and inadvertently excluded those of us whose ways of knowing, doing, and being in the world are challenging or uncomfortable to dominant logics.
A metaphor is what motivated me to undertake my PhD … I was a full-time high school teacher, teaching English and music, with a background and training in jazz music performance … To me, jazz and teaching were similar. Jazz was a metaphor for teaching.
In the creative and performing arts, resonance is everywhere, both literally and metaphorically … Metaphorically, in moments of connection, performers feel a resonance with their audience – an actor may feel “heard” by their fans; a musician might be “amplified” by a crowd’s roaring applause.
Metaphors live at the cross-roads of convergence and divergence, and they meet at points of connection, contraction, and intersectional friction. Indeed, it is metaphor’s unusual ability to simultaneously emphasise and de-emphasise certain understandings that gives metaphor its argumentative force and its creative power.
The veil is a material device that articulates, enhances, and controls space, and an epistemological metaphor for expressing both the revelation of knowledge and the suppression of infection. The veil functions to both reveal and conceal. Given recent upheavals in studio education, it is important that teachers provide students with opportunities to engage the veil, embrace infection, and sense out their circumstances.
Teaching someone how to sit down to write is as important as teaching them how to write at all. While creative writing is often mythologised as the result of divine and spontaneous inspiration … many writers and instructors will offer different advice – that writing is a more Hephaestion labour … one that requires consistent mental and physical struggle against one’s baser instinct to do anything else.
It is difficult to communicate what it means to live with an eating disorder … This illness, anorexia nervosa, has profoundly impacted my life in ways that words cannot express. In my art practice, I utilise metaphorical imagery to challenge stereotypical eating disorder images, such as the physically thin body, in order to adopt a novel way of looking at ordinary objects through an eating disorder perspective.
In the spirit of reconciliation, the DDCA acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.