The resource comprises five short films documenting the development of ideas in the work of a cross-section of students from the BA and MA ceramic programs at the National Centre for Ceramics, Wales. Cardiff School of Arts and design. The films render visible their negotiation of thought and seek to illustrate tendencies and patterns in the ways ideas are developed.
Whilst a key concern for students is innovation, the ways in which they negotiate ideas often employ common traits. Within an educational context, the identification of these forms of development can provide a toolbox of possibilities to be altered or rejected at any stage in the development of a given body of work but always present, to generate and keep ideas mobile. Teaching and learning in this way can be far more explicit about ways in which students can forge connections between properties, build upon them, recognize strengths and direct approach toward overriding expression.
The significance of identifying these structures is three fold:
• encouraging objectivity
• generating understanding of aesthetic language
• developing analytical skills
The student can take responsibility to find and employ appropriate methods or indeed devise their own. What is important is that the teaching and learning of art is not solely evidenced according to outcome but more tangibly according to how that outcome can be achieved.
