How Much Percussion Can We Take was commissioned as a response to Joseph Noonan-Ganley’s collection of artist’s texts, THE CESSPOOL OF RAPTURE (MA Bibliotheque, 2024). My letter/essay is an afterword to Noonan-Ganley’s chapter of texts on teaching practice.

This afterword is a letter addressed to Noonan-Ganley and joins with the preceding conversation with Claire Makhlouf Carter titled, ‘Learning to Teach’.

The letter evokes how teaching and learning feels in a vibrant and busy art studio. The common forms of the tutorial, the crit and the student exhibition arise within the text but are fictionalised as situations of provocation, opposition and grace. The writing has a fractured buoyancy which captures the energy needed to inhabit an active learning and teaching situation with a large group of art students. Methods of observation, listening and non-verbal holding are described in relation to daily habits of creative practice.