INTRODUCTION
SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL is our new project for summer 2020. Like many parents of young children, the closure of schools, imposed during the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, has compelled us to reevaluate our family’s relationship with formal learning, school as an institution, and the prospect of a protracted period of “home schooling.” As artists, we have access to all kinds of techniques for exploring these relationships with our children, (as we have done previously, in our residency at NKD, Norway in 2019). Living on the Toronto Islands, we also have lucky enough to have access to studios at Artscape Gibraltar Point, as a place to practically make new work as a family unit. This site – now a studio complex – was formerly a state school. Our new project will see the studios return to their original function as a place for children’s learning, this time diffracted through art, and the context of human relations to SARS-COV-2.
The studio will become a base for experiments in learning and collective artistic work, as an alternative to “home schooling.”
Throughout the summer, we will be led by the kinds of interests that have preoccupied us so far during the “lockdown”: decisive relationships between humans and other species – such as the novel corona virus; living with constraints on movement and social-interactions; the imposition of the “household” as a minimum unit of society; our family’s genealogy, mapped onto everyday life, culture and ecology in different historical periods; as well as everyday activities, such as our renewed focus on cooking and eating together, changed living- and working-arrangements; and travel by bike, on foot, and on water to the studio.
We think that this will be a good example of how Artscape Gibraltar Point – the organization where we are basing this project – as an arts organization with its roots in a specific local community, and as the former site of a public school, can help to make alternative provision for art and learning during, and immediately following, the current pandemic. It provides advanced-thinking for both arts organizations, and artist-parents, on how to move beyond current models of “home schooling” during the pandemic, to encompass the studio – as a ‘white cube’ and in an expanded sense – as a site for new pedagogical practices.
This is not a 'boutique' alternative to public education, but an improvisation while pandemic-related restrictions hold sway. We continue to fully-support publicly-funded education for all. We especially support the teachers that are facing increased pressure to move their work online, and who have to deal with increased presentee-ism, surveillance, and micro-management of their working lives within the present circumstances.
WEEKS 1 & 2
STUDIO SET-UP
We discussed arrangements for desk-space, and agreed to have a desk each. This comes as something of a luxury to us, as we are used to our workspaces also functioning as places to eat, cook, or general storage, and we are well aware of the class-based criticisms of insisting on a desk (or a room) 'of one's own'.
We have installed a larger table in the middle of the room for collective work, meetings, and larger-scale dry work. We hung some of the artefacts from our previous residency, at NKD in Norway, as a reminder of the themes of our work as POPECULLEN.
SETTING-UP THE LIBRARY
We have moved a selection of reference books into the studio, some of which we have been reading for specific projects, and others on more general topics. We are again looking to Bruno Munari's 'how to' guides – how to draw trees and the sun – as examples of how we might develop more explicitly the kinds of exercises that could emerge from ongoing projects. We're also looking at Cuzen's handbook for blot paintings, as a way of developing simple exercises from more complex or speculative experiments in the studio.
ROOM FOR IMPROVISATION
We are letting our curriculum emerge from ongoing practical work, as well as from more serendipitous, meandering, and speculative activities that take place in and around the home, studio, and all points between. For example, K noticed that paint began to mix itself when left to its own devices in a palette. From this, V has asked K to contribute to an episode of her SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL podcast about 'the science of paint,' which we can subsequently pursue into other subject areas.
We needed a ball, suitable for knocking around in the studio (with a baseball bat that we found washed-up on the nearby beach) so we made one from crumpled scrap paper and tape. Later, V & K recorded the sound of it sliding down a plastic paper-carrier tube.
HELLO, and BYE-BYE STUDIO
Within the first couple of days, V had written a poem – or more like an incantation – to be performed on leaving the studio. Bye-bye Studio was first written-out, then recorded. A sister poem, Morning Studio was written on the following day on our arrival.
THE HULOT CHAIR
Moving into the studio is a time to test its affordances, to see what it encourages us to do. We sat at desks, used the chairs, and in doing so found the "farting" chair which emits a loud guff of air when Sn's full-weight is plonked onto it. We are fans of Jacques Tati's Playtime, which features a similarly vocal black leather (or is it vinyl?) chair, and laugh every time someone sits in the one in the corner of the studio. We recorded its windy emissions for posterity.
NEW & OLD IDEAS
"ABRA, ABRACADABRA…"
We hold a 'wassail' each year – a folkway derived from British, Saxon-era and charms. Reading a book with V & K about charms and incantations, we came across some information about the Roman ABRACADABRA charm. To ward off the plague, (or malaria, according to Chris Gosden in his latest book) the word was written repeatedly, each time starting on a new line, and removing the first letter. This was worn as an amulet. In 17th Century London, this charm was written on the doors of houses to keep the plague at bay. Sn made these small block-prints and hand-drawn posters for our studio doors.
CORONA VIRUS VOTIVES
This reminded us of when we collected Roman Catholic amulets - votives that were to be thrown away to relieve the symptoms of disease or malady. A leg-shaped amulet which we kept caused us no end of trouble: sciatica, and eventually a broken leg. We followed the age-old custom and threw it into the Thames at Blackfriars.
Given the pandemic, we made small votives of SARS-COV-2 – the novel corona virus that's causing us to reduce the number, density and proximity of our immediate social relations – and threw them into Lake Ontario.
OUR NEIGHBOURS
Any artist's residency involves negotiating with your neighbours – never more so than when you work as a family with young, energetic children. and other people are trying to concentrate on expressions of their own, individual, artistic excellence.
But it's not only our human neighbours that we live close to. Much of our work at NKD in 2018 was driven by our awareness of other species that lived around us. Wasps played a large part in our time there – we made nest for them from one of Tim Morton's book for instance –and it looks as though they will feature in our lives here too. This is the nest hanging from a tree outside our back-door. Other species also make their way in on the breeze. V wants to "talk to the animals" and already has ideas about how we should go about this.
SEND IN THE CROWDS
Restrictions on physical proximity and gathering in social groups presents real challenges to "participatory" art practice – the kinds of work that we ordinarily do. Until recently, we saw working in a collective mode and in cohering disparate groups of people (or people and other species) was an antidote to the social formations produced by incessant waves of consumer-led capitalism, neoliberalism, and the Californian Ideology. Now, we've been been forced into physical isolation, as a household and as artists, we are wondering where the crowds will form. On the one hand we look forward to the moment when we can sing together, mingle, and move across international borders again.
While we want to celebrate the 'more-than-human' co-mingling of yeasts, humans, and other species (in a wassail for instance) we are also wary of the mix of humans and SARS-COV-2 that makes its way to the islands by ferry every day. Crowds take on a menace at the moment.
Sn drew some pencil-drawings from production stills of his past projects that involved gathering groups of people. From this he revisited Cozens' 'blot painting' technique to see, not landscape, but crowds of people (and of the virus) in the ink blots on paper.
Here are some examples. The plan is to take this as a scheme to make drawings together, and to introduce some of the sociological and philosophical questions that come from thinking of the characteristics and meaning of crowds now, and at other times in history.
WEEK 3
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Our residency takes place on the traditional territory and, since 2010, the Treaty land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. As with other projects that we are involved with (community organizations, a Friendship group of islanders and MCFN members, the island wassail) we acknowledge these treaties, covenants and traditions. We always seek to affirm this at the outset of any public-facing activities here, and our ever-increasing awareness of the fraught nature of settler-First Nation relations informs our private thoughts and actions. To bring these matters into focus for us in this project, we wrote a simplified Land Acknowledgment – an acknowledgment of treaties and territory – based on that signed-off by MCFN for use by community organizations on the island. We consider the Land Acknowledgement, and our thoughts and actions that are guided by it, as a formal, political necessity in political negotiations between the MCFN and the other three levels of government in Canada. Some settlers choose to shift emphasis to an acknowledgment of the land itself – as an political agent, or spiritual embodiment for example – but we respect the Land Acknowledgement as a vital part of the political process entered into by First Nations in their current dealings with the Crown. We have other ways of articulating our understanding and lived experience of our relationship to more-than-human, multi-species worlds, some of which we will attend to here, in SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL.
THE INDIGO BUNTING
Sh published and edited a 'zine 'by island children for the island community' this week. Contributions were solicited and the first issue was distributed to each island home. Production work took place in the studio, sometimes including our own children (in drawing and writing). This is an example of the kind of ongoing work that will cross-over and thread through our studio, and which we will attempt to incorporate into our learning there.
AS TALL AS A MILKWEED
A few years ago Sh made a series of drawings – based on botanical illustrations – of plant-life that was as tall as K. While she continues this series in the studio, the rest of us will join in. First step was to find plants equivalent to our heights. We measured ourselves in the studio, then measured individual plants in the area surrounding the studio: a lily, hollyhock, and an apple tree. Each was photographed, with some rudimentary image-editing and cropping, ready for printing this week. These will then be projected on paper, pinned to the studio wall, to make full-scale drawings.
US AND THE CURRICULUM
Our intention with this project has been to map our current and ongoing art projects onto the local Provincial curriculum, as a way to gauge the ways in which we can put these projects to use for our children while there is a suspension of their formal school-based and teacher-led learning. We also want to encourage the serendipitous learning opportunities that come our way when we integrate our working and family lives, at home and in the studio. The first phase of this work has involved just getting on with our work; the next will be more deliberately self-reflexive, and will involve more conscious reading of the curriculum through our work. Already, we can see that we are at odds with certain aspects of the Provincial curriculum - in our understanding of mathematics as also having an ethics and politics for example, or in the ways that the Arts are more than personal expression or means to learn how to be empathetic. In our own experience as artists, we recognize that artists are at liberty to explore less individualistic, expressive. and less instrumentalized modes of artistic work, and operate in a wider range of registered than that presented in the government policy documents that we have access to.
THE OLD ISLAND PUBLIC SCHOOL
Our project could easily have started as an attempt at 'no schooling,' but we recognize that this has already been the default position for us during 'lockdown.' As we are keen to learn about how we can stay registered within the state-school system while living and working elsewhere for short periods of time, we want to get more of grip on state-regulated schooling, and how we can cross-over with the curriculum in the event that we are physically remote from its teachers.
We are also sceptical of the shift to 'online' learning, with its smooth-integration with certain large software corporation's data-harvesting ambitions and stealthy privatization of the state-regulated education sector – (hello Mr. G**g*e, on whose servers this website sits). So, being based in an old Public School building is a statement of our ambition to ensure some relation to state-provision, and how to negotiate this when we are either forced to be remote from it (as in the 'lockdown' period) or when we have, out of necessity, move elsewhere temporarily for work.
"DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR ANCESTORS' BONES ARE?"
Since the early-days of the 'lockdown' we have been avid fans of the BBC series Horrible Histories. Since watching, we have become more expert on the trials and tribulations of various monarchs and key figures in European history.
Our own ancestors lived somewhat less-well documented lives, but nevertheless, we have been able to trace at least nine generations of our, mainly, English and Scottish lineage. On the anniversary of the birth of V & K's great-grandmother, we took the opportunity to make a simple family tree which depicts her maternal line back to the early 1700s.
Later, we will use this chart to map world events, and other key dates pertinent to our current local situation (such as dates of Treaties).
We did all this while thinking about something that was said to Sn a few years ago, when a acquaintance from the MCFN wondered whether settlers in North America knew "where the bones are" – the bones of their own ancestors that is. Historically, Canada's modernizing impulse has encouraged newcomers to sever this connection. But we know that this is not always the case these days, with more newcomers holding firmly onto their languages, culture, and family histories. Some of us know where the bones are. Our next step is to understand all this in relation to the other Nations that share this land.
WHAT DID WE LEARN DURING THE LOCKDOWN?
This project represents our attempt to work out what 'remote learning' looks like for us while there are pandemic-related restrictions on state-provision of education. As well as attempting to understand how the formal school curriculum relates to our studio-based activities, we also want to know how the other stuff that we get up to – such as our reading, listening and watching, and more general activities – can be claimed to inform our family's learning. Since 'lockdown' in mid-March we have followed a chain of interests, largely led by our children as far as reading and video-watching goes. We have started to make a note of these: watching Horrible Histories led to us asking about our own family's British and Norman roots; later, we watched and read Catweazle for a an account of pre-Conquest life and magic; this intersected with reading the first Harry Potter books; and further texts on spells and charms from Roman and pre-Roman Britain; this, in turn, led to V & K dressing as Boudicca-era warriors for a couple of weeks. We are now setting these events into a sequence, to visualize the extent of our interests during the past five months. Again, this will encourage us to find ways to relate this, less-structured, more serendipitous learning, to the formal curriculum.
WEEKS 4 & 5
KEEPING TRACK OF THE DAYS
It's been the same question throughout the pandemic. Is it Monday? Thursday? Early on we didn't keep track of the days at all. Except for Friday: grocery day. Now that we've rented a studio for a time-limited period, we want to make sure we get the most out of this exceptional opportunity. So, we have been keeping a simple Post-it calendar.
THE EXQUISITE FOREST
Sh is working on a mail art project, which comes from wondering how her artist-parent group, MOTHRA, can maintain its social network during the pandemic without resorting to F***b***k etc.. And this is it: an exquisite corpse technique used to draw a tree. These pencil drawings on concertina-folded paper – pictured here – will be sent in the post soon.
AS TALL AS A MILKWEED: more drawings
CANOE TO SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL DAY
We set-off for the studio by canoe, and made our way from Ward's Island to the dock near the lighthouse at Gibraltar Point – about 5km perhaps. It took us a hour-and--half, and longer for the return journey. Up to this point we have only cycled. This mode enabled us to take our time, slowing down to look for fish, kingfishers, various herons and egrets, as well as other boats. Time at the studio felt very relaxed in comparison to most other days, but perhaps less focused on production.
On our way, we met our neighbour L, who was out testing for water-quality in the Sunfish Cut area of the Lagoon. Later, L – who also has a studio at Artscape Gibraltar Point – delivered a wooden canoe to us. It needs some TLC – perhaps a few coats of the flax oil that we bought for making perfumes. We will think about how we can develop this theme some more; maybe we'll make our own carved wooden boats? We will definitely paddle to the studio on other occasions.
A NEW SMELL FOR THE STUDIO
When we first arrived at the studio, a month ago now, we asked each other what ideas immediately sprang to mind. V suggested 'a new smell for the studio' and, given her recent interest in perfumerie, we set about picking herbs and other vegetation to steep in some flax oil. Next step is to experiment with crushing and soaking. Eventually, we will try the oil in a small, electronic vapourizer that will fill the space with the scent of plants found in the garden just outside the studio.
AS CLOSE AS WE GET TO A ROUTINE
A daily routine has emerged, post-lockdown. Here's V & K's diagramming of a typical day – part of it, in any case.
WEEK 6
PLAYING QUAD IN THE KING'S COURT
Outside the studio, in the old school playground, there are two Four Square or King's Court areas, marked in paint on the ground. We took some measurements, and made a scaled-down version inside the studio (it was a day of thunderstorms). In playing the game, we realized that there are some similarities between the permutations of movements around the court, and those of Samuel Beckett's well-known theatrical work, Quad (or Quadrat). We wondered what kind of social world is modelled by Beckett's automata, and whether they act according to rules only, or to each other (in moderating their pace as they move within and around the perimetre of the square) for example).
Each quadrant of the court measures 6ft or 180cm, and approximates the physical distancing measures that have been brought in during the pandemic. We wondered what kind of social work this distancing produces, and whether this was prefigured by Beckett.
We tried out some of the rule-bound movements for ourselves; this exercise soon became a free-for-all – a mad dash around the square, chasing, breaking, ignoring, or inventing new rules to be played within the given structure.
MAKING KIN: MOTHRA RETURNS
Sh convenes the next MOTHRA artist-residency at APG next month. In preparation, the MOTHRA banner was unfurled and pinned to our studio walls this week.
THE BIG ROOM: now filled with ideas big and small
We have a less tidy, but much busier, studio now.
THE NEW PERFUME
We spent a while grinding-up dried leaves, soaking them in flax oil, and heating over a bain-marie. Now we have a perfumed oil for our small vapourizer; and now the studio has a fresh minty-grassy odour – the sum of a selection of plants growing in the yard..
PLAGUE MASKS
We have to wear masks that cover our nose and mouth whenever we move around the building beyond our studio. We started to wonder about the masks used during plagues through history. We have looked at Carnevale di Venezia masks, Commedia dell'arte masks, and (not unrelated) 17th C "plague doctor" masks. We have started to make our own, to see how they relate to and interact with our cloth versions. Here are some images of making mould from modelling-clay. Next: the papier mâché layer...
COLLOGRAPHS FOR AN AFTERNOON
WEEK 7
BACK TO SCHOOL?
School's are due to open on 15th September, a week later than originally planned by the local School Board. The discussion in the press has been about reductions in class-sizes, and the options available to students for "remote learning." It turns out that this latter choice is actually what is now being called "virtual school," which involves re-deployed teachers engaging pupils in a mix of synchronous and asynchronous learning, mediated by various online tools. The teachers are given a group of children from various schools, and are themselves therefore not part of the local school community that will persist beyond the pandemic.
There is no third choice presented to parents; there is no option to opt-out of "virtual school" while maintaining an, albeit remote, relationship with a specific school, its teachers and children.
Our intention remains to register with our local school, with teachers that we know, and who will be with children, the majority of whom were previously registered with the school. We hope to ensure – as funding follows students in this, and in many other similar situations – that funding goes to a specific school, and to teachers who are already deployed to that school and committed to its life beyond the pandemic. In the coming month or so, we aim to build a relationship with our children's teachers so that we can connect our studio-based learning with the school – in whatever way is appropriate under current, pandemic-related, conditions.
MORE SMELLS
Not to be outsmarted, K also produced a new 'perfume' for the studio. A mixture of rain-water, soil, and seaweed, this mixture stinks – an effective counterpoint to our herb-based concoction (above). However, there's no way that this evil stink-potion will ever find its way into our vapourizer. Instead, it remains, at arms length (or preferably even further away) outside, on the steps of the studio.
MASK STILL UNDERWAY
We added the papier mâché layer to the 17th century-style plague masks. This process has taken most of the week to complete.
WALKING ROUND THE STUDIO
Way back, when Sn was making artwork from walking, he hit on the idea of approximating the route of a walk – done previously, elsewhere – using furniture from various hotel rooms where he happened to be staying. We saw how V & K had been playing with some of the studio furniture, and Sh was reminded of Walking Round My Room (2005-6). We asked V & K which walk they remembered most vividly, and it was the "8 kilometre walk" that we did several times at NKD a couple of summers ago. First, we talked about the route, and then V and K set about making a scale-model – actually a very rough approximation – of the terrain, taking into account relative altitude, landmarks, and waypoints.
WEEK 8
END OF SECOND MONTH: Assessing what we've done
We have extended our project for another month – maybe two if we're lucky – in anticipation of another disrupted and irregular school term. We will be in the "big room" again during September, and have decided to continue with experimenting with a variety of artistic processes, especially those that require a larger space, or that are "messy." In October we will move into a smaller room, with some wall space, and desks, but perhaps a sixth of the floor-space. We will work more intensively on mapping the curriculum onto studio-based activities at that point, with a plan to work on reflexive studies of how the artworks that we have produced so far, and the processes entered into, can open up other co-learning opportunities of us all. This might take the form of producing cookstrip-like drawings to describe the work that we have done throughout July, August, and September.
MASK-MAKING: painting
The mask are dry, and so time for first coat of white paint.
FASHION FORWARD
V spotted a Judy left in one of the hallways, so dragged it into the studio for some impromptu clothes-designing. L, our studio-neighbour, left some materials also, which were quickly made use of by The House of PopeCullen.
WEEK 9
READY-TO-WEAR MASK
Two coats of paint, holes drilled for headband, and the nose stuffed with mint. The first mask is ready to wear. Here, the plague mask hangs with a handmade COVID-19 pandemic mask by the studio door.
STUDIO GETTING BUSY
TO BE EXPLODED
Sn is still reading Chris Gosden's The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present which mentions examples of animal effigies, found in a 'magician's hut' being 'deliberately exploded' in a kiln at Dolní Věstonice in what is now the Czech Republic (p.35). Gosden speculates that these clay figures were 'experiments, perhaps, in forms of participation, in order to understand to what extent and in what ways people were entangled with animals and with the earth from which figurines were made' (p.36).
His Assembly of Companions & Relations series has been going for a year, and Sn is thinking of extending this work, adding an array of clay figures – some of which are shown here.
GOING BINAURAL WITH VANESSA
Sh is making a new audio-walk for an upcoming outdoor exhibition, so we have been experimenting with binaural recordings. The portable rubber baldhead – who V has named Vanessa – has had gel ears pinned to her, into which binaural microphones with windshields were inserted.
We have made preliminary recordings of the studio and its close environs, such as the herb garden. Further work will include an audio 'portrait' of the studio, as well as production of Sh's new audio-walk, planned for later in the month.
PREPARING FOR FORTHCOMING PROJECTS
Sh has several commissions entering production: an object biographies project for a local museum; and a mail art project with MOTHRA's network. This week has seen this production work starting in studio.
WEEK 10
A CHARM FOR A VIRUS
We've returned to a theme explored earlier in our residency: Pandemic Charm is an adaptation of the Abracadabra charm, used in the Roman Empire (c. 300 CE), and during the plague in seventeenth century London. It's made in expectation of a “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, naming the virus, and "reducing" it by conforming it to the inverted-triangle format.
It is printed on a corrugated substrate, used by the City for its pandemic-related information panels, and mounted on the front door of the Ward’s Island Association clubhouse. Our Pandemic Charm is an experiment with popular magic, as protection for the community against the virus. It is also a reminder that our belief in the power of words over material reality is being tested to breaking point by the pandemic.A version of this work will be exhibited in the forthcoming local exhibition, Rogue Wave. It will be mounted on the front door of the local community hall, as an experiment with a magical, rather an scientific, way to protect residents from the virus.
SCHOOL'S IN, BUT WE'RE OUT
Our local school went back at the end of last week, but within a day there were further disruptions with teacher-dismissals – which we find totally reprehensible –as well as the increased speculation about the imminent increase in cases of those suffering COVID-19 symptoms. We live in the neighbourhood with the highest number of recent cases in the city – not as many as in some other North American cities – but showing signs of steadily increasing, nonetheless. So, after one day of attending school, we pulled our children out. We are fortunate to have alternative options, and have decided to continue with SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL indefinitely, until both the school, and the virus, present themselves in a less antagonistic manner.
MOTHRA IS BACK
Sh's artist-parent network convenes again this week, with three artists and their children in residence at AGP. Our work this week will often cross-over with MOTHRA's activities. We move into another studio at AGP at the start of next week, so will also be packing-down and preparing the next phase of work – more focused on developing a curriculum based on new and ongoing projects.
WEEK 11
DOWNSIZE
We moved into a smaller room at AGP this week – the old nurses room, which then became the Principle's office. We are looking forward to working in what we will have to call "a SMALLER room for BIG ideas."
RESUMING WORK IN THE NEW STUDIO at WEEK 14
HOME-SCHOOL? NO. SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL
Due to our choosing not to return to our local school this term (partly due to the pandemic, partly due to recent behaviour by its management/administration) we have had to submit an 'intent to home-school' form to the local school board. So, although we intend to return to the public education system once these conditions change sufficiently, we are now, officially, registered as "home-schoolers". This has prompted us to look again, and in more detail, at the ways in which this project coincides with the Provincial curriculum, and pedagogical approaches more broadly.
ON HOLD
From October to December our other projects took over the studio. This is a temporary measure, and SCHOOL-ART-SCHOOL will return in the New Year.
SHUT THE FRONT DOOR
