Making bread with your feet: How do we learn to talk through gestural moments and speculative acts?
Creators: name: Ayliffe, Maggie
name: Bracey, Andrew
name: Lee, Joanne
name: Onions, Laura
Publisher: name: University of Lincoln
Year: 2024
Subjects: W100 - Fine art

description: This was a conference workshop session at the Gentle Gestures Stream of Midlands Conference for Critical Thought held at Nottingham Trent University, 
<strong>April 5th</strong> <strong>to April 6th, 2024</strong>.
<strong>Making bread with your feet: How do we learn to talk through gestural moments and speculative acts?</strong>
<br>
Maggie Ayliffe, Andrew Bracey, Jo Lee, Danica Maier, Laura Onions
<br>
In 2018 Julieta Garcia Vazquez and Freddie Mason devised a collective writing experiment where ‘participants would make bread with their feet and write at the same time’ to create a situation in which writing was ‘literally synchronised with a viscous material’[1]
<br>
For this strand we are proposing an interactive workshop that will also explore the language and poetics of gentle gesture in Fine Art Practice and explore the pedagogic potential of bringing language to speculative acts.
<br>
We aim to explore:
<br>
How we might use the language of gentle gesture to teach students to think through the body, engage in speculative acts and, use the tools and spaces of making to express ideas that might be difficult to ‘speak of’ or pre-plan?
<br>
How might we create conditions for students to confidently explore the space, performance, and tools for making gestures that indexically speak to their practice and audience across any medium?
<br>
How do we talk to this practice critically and as an important pedagogic model within the wider academic sector in which we work?
<br>
Our workshop will follow a model that we developed for the: On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach conference at Glasgow School of Art (June ‘23) in which we asked participants to explore the importance of the studio (a space of not knowing) to our pedagogy. The session included a compilation of films of studios made by students and colleagues from different institutions and a ‘working lunch’ during which we explored different questions and recorded our ideas (and spillages) on specially designed tablecloths.
<br>
This workshop builds upon one delivered at ‘Gentle Gestures’ strand of the Midlands Conference of Critical Thought in March 2024 For this workshop we will call on our colleagues and students to send us films that capture the acts, tools, people, and spaces required to activate a moment of gestural speaking in any medium. The compilation of these films will create a prototype visual lexicon of creative movement and form the introduction to the workshop.
Following this, participants will be led through a series of tasks and questions that encourage speculative thinking and explore how they might articulate through drawn gestures what it feels: To feel, touch, activate, brush, signal, indicate, host, carry, trust, blush,disrupt.<br>
<br>
We will ask:
· How do we create the conditions for such speculative making/thinking?
· How do we encourage students to embody their feelings through gesture?
· Can we teach students to touch with care, to be attentive to the surface, the qualities of materials, to make marks with focus, to understand their body in its relationship to making?
· Can we think critically through gesture? And if so, how do we talk to this process?
<br>
Through an active process of working with participants, we aim to pool the collective experience and knowledge of the group to articulate tacit and embodied concerns vital to speculative thought and creativity. We want to use this knowledge, alongside our findings from ‘the studio’ project to demonstrate the value of creative pedagogy, speculative acts and thoughts to others.
<br>
[1] Mason, F (2020) The Viscous: Slime, Fondling, Mixtures, Punctum Books pg. 156