A niggle that goes along the lines of: when an artist has spent so long investing their thoughts and actions in a material they are tuned in to reading that material, that object. A growing feeling that “sculpture” as a discipline wasn’t perhaps having its best time. But there’s the Rub of the Grub that’s been niggling at me since I studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in the 1990’s. Humans can read objects – with our bodies as well as our heads. If we’re lucky, we might sometimes feel it in an art gallery, or a museum, looking at a tiny object which has survived the centuries, or a piece of contemporary sculpture. We might feel it when are near architecture. Think of it as a kind of empathy towards physical things around us. Alongside, because we have known what it is to make, to hold a vessel, to feel a texture, to sense a weight (these are our haptic senses), we also then have the skills to look at an object, a thing, and feel a response. Our fingers ache, sometimes we bleed, but it’s what humans have done so some of us still do it.
That’s the fun, the challenge: we learn to form, to control, to re-shape. Where there is physical material, there is always a battle – no matter the tools that help us shape, the ideas which lead us forward, whenever we make the physical materials resist.
Clay under my nails, glue on my skin, ink on my clothes. As a maker, I was the child with stuff on my hands. For many years I have been meaning to write a post called The Slip and The Grub, exploring the relationship of physical to digital in art education. And the “what ifs” feed right into the sweet spots which anxiety loves: the unknowable future, the fear of change and the existential wrestle over whether our lives are, or are not, relevant. How do teachers view artwork generated by AI? Should teachers use AI to create relevant lesson plans? Might AI write a better proposal/email/cover letter than I can? What does it mean for artists if artwork can be generated by AI? We are all clear about one thing – that we are at the start of an experiment with very little protocol.
The number of conversations around what AI might mean to visual arts education, of course, increases. In this post Paula Briggs, author of Make, Build, Create: Sculpture Projects for Children and Drawing Projects for Children, explores how AI and digital might impact a return to making.
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