Drawing learning: Letting art teach

Abstract

Abstract Contextualized through the writing of Gert Biesta, this research proposes that as both artists and educators we should 'let art teach'. It proposes a position for student and teacher that focuses upon developing a curiosity-driven desire for meaningful dialogue with the world through broader educational and existential experience. In this context, and seen through the lens of drawing artist, musician, educator and postgraduate researcher, the article invites a first-person reflective discussion of two experiments from the author's ongoing practice-led research, which bring together an embodied knowledge of music and drawing practice, to uncover how drawing may be valued as an enactive physical, cognitive and perceptual process of poesis. By moving beyond the self-conscious desire to make an artwork, the experiments using blind drawing, bilateral mark-making and sound engage with ideas of 'unknowing' and Biesta's notion of 'interruption' to explore how drawing may offer access to different types of learning. Standing inside my practice, I understand that in the act of drawing, I can neither fail to generate ideas, escape my own existence, nor leave a mark upon the world.