On Singing — Singing with Sam Ainsley, Anne-Marie Copestake, David Harding, Ross Sinclair and Peter McCaughey. A celebration and reflection on the role of singing and 'to sing' in the development, identity and pedagogy of the Environmental Art department at GSA.
Group contribution as part of The Ignorant Art School, 12 Hour Sit-in Revel, a twelve hour event curated by Cooper Gallery, Dundee, which took place in June 2022.
The group performance consisted of vocal contributions from Sam Ainsley, David Harding, Ross Sinclair, Peter McCaughey, and Anne-Marie Copestake, and an active contribution from Anne-Marie Copestake in the form of preparation of and serving, or delivering, of a drink to everyone present.
"The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation brings together artists, designers, educators, activists, cultural workers, students and other publics to questions what art education is and whom it serves. Enthused with revolutionary solidarity and organised as a collaborating collective The Ignorant Art School creatively re-imagines and co-constitutes radical blueprints for a socially transformative art education that opens towards an emancipated future.
Repurposing equality as a practice rather than an ideal, The Ignorant Art School examines the histories and future possibilities of art education. Directed towards a revolutionary and creative emancipation The Ignorant Art School celebrates feminist and social activist bell hooks’ declaration of “education as the practice of freedom”* by building communities of resistance and care.
Composed as five ‘Sit-ins’ The Ignorant Art School adopts the activist tactic of occupying institutional space as a critical and creative attitude and praxis to transform the Cooper Gallery into a laboratory for radical, ethical and accessible pedagogies for the many underscored by an economy of solidarity." Cooper Gallery
Re-imagining art education and unsettling systems of knowledge, The Ignorant Art School in the shade of trees in summertime will cultivate alternative futures, determined not by what we know, but by how we learn, unlearn, create and share knowledge together. In the words of the visionary Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel will activate a landscape “where the mind is without fear, the head is held high and where knowledge is free.”
Inhabiting Dundee’s Botanic Garden and timed by Ruth Ewan’s revolutionary decimal clock, the revel will host a convivial convergence for visions and praxes of radical, ethical and accessible pedagogies that question what art education is and who it serves. Addressing knowledge as a collaborative, collective and social experience, the revel will manifest the actual plurality of lived perspectives that constitute our world.
Radical in intent and collaborative by nature, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel will bring together a coalition of artists, activists, culture workers, educators, musicians, performers, students, thinkers, writers, and various communities in Scotland and from around the world to sing and dance, to observe and reflect, to listen and watch, to converse, question, and so constitute a ‘field of possibility’ (bell hooks).
Celebrating equality of access with a generous solidarity, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel asserts the potential of transforming knowledge from a capitalist commodity to an emancipatory power available to all.
