Wax on, Wax off: Exercises in thinking and action

This paper details a collaborative teaching model used to deliver the Site-Specific Sculpture elective unit offered within Adelaide Central School of Art’s BVA program. Over the course of a five-day intensive component overseen by two lecturers, students undertake work in the field, using only materials sourced from the site. The collaborative aspect of the unit manifests not only in the ‘team teaching’ model but also in the projects themselves, many of which are designed for groups of two or more students. The purpose of the field trip is to develop agility in the act of thinking and action. The structure of the week is built around three-hour blocks, the project brief being delivered in the first fifteen minutes of each block. With no prior planning, works have to be conceived and carried out in the given time-frame. This strategy deliberately collides thinking more overtly with material investigation, as an alternative to making work that is planned prior to its physical realisation. Thus, new ideas and approaches might be generated through interaction with a material, thing or place. In keeping with this sensibility, we design a series of open-ended projects that guide the structure of the field trip, however final decisions about the specific conditions for projects are made on-site. As lecturers we are only one step ahead of any particular event, allowing us to be more responsive to circumstances as they unfold and to some degree putting us on an equal footing of ‘risk’ with the students.