Of Course!

Focus area: Painting – time-and lens-based media – material and object-based installation

Module responsible: Duncan Higgins

Much of our inherited knowledge and traditions of representation come through the history of painting. Paintings fill our imaginations and show us a spectrum of ideas, memories, and identities. How can we continue to shape such representations through our work as contemporary artists?

Through presentations, seminars, tutorials, and a concluding group exhibition/event, this module explores our personal and cultural relationships to the idea we call “landscape” – a concept that carries wonderful representations of individual and national identities yet also produces a contemporary environmental trauma with problematic consequences. Looking closely at the myths, symbols, memories, technologies, and obsessions that underlie our own interactions with the natural world, we will investigate how art practice can contribute to an evolving understanding of the relationship between nature and culture, and environment and imagination.

This is a project-based module that seeks to question and unsettle what we know, what we think we know, and what we assume as obvious. Central to the module’s investigation are shared imaginaries, systems of knowledge and belief, and the very nature of the art ‘course’ (of course!).

PRO modules are designed to enrich your artist development (as explored in the ART modules) through activating skills, connecting communities of practice, and investigating disciplinary territories. PRO modules allow you to focus on a specific project critically connected to your own practice within a context established by the module leader(s).

Knowledge:

• Develop awareness of relevant references, discourses, and practices

Skills

• Enhance and broaden your own skills and processes through the creation of a self-initiated project

General Competence

• Identify your own learning needs in relation to the subject area(s)
• Critique and reformulate prior knowledge
• Develop and present new work.