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©2024 entheogen designTeaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy stems from my time working as a studio assistant for sculptor Lisa Lapinski, who introduced me to conceptual art as a visual medium for expressing philosophical ideas. While Lapinski’s work deals with semiotics and epistemology (see Miss Swiss), my work responds to phenomenology and new materialist posthumanism. Through engagement with philosophy, I have come to believe that form without content is problematic in that it fails to acknowledge contemporary social and environmental injustices. Holistic art education should address the intersection of human perception and the expressive agency of materials, best developed through free play and experimentation.
Though I focus on computer aided design and CNC fabrication in my master’s thesis, my undergraduate education involved traditional studio art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, film, and sculpture. As I became fascinated with sculpture, I learned mold-making, slip-casting, woodworking, and welding, which continue to deeply inform my digital fabrication process. Sculpture ignited my curiosity about art’s surroundings as I moved towards the more temporal mediums of performance, projection, and installation, as well as elements of architectural, furniture, and landscape design. At this point, I began to see fundamental phenomena – bodies, sound, light, and space – as mediums themselves.
Working in these mediums, I began to realize that my skillset is not my technical fluency with tools, my understanding of materiality, or my knowledge of art history – rather, my skill is deep listening to the world to serve as a conduit for what is called for by the matter at hand. Art is overwhelming: there is an infinite multitude of things that can be created – the trickiest thing is finding what must be created. In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown says, “There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.” Finding this conversation has become my imperative in collaborative research – only through deep listening do we become comfortable expressing how we truly feel, and only in expressing how we truly feel may we build trust in each other and find confidence in the outcomes of our process.
Fostering this trust and confidence in the classroom begins with engaging in productive critique practices. Students’ worldly engagement with troubling issues is predicated on creating classroom environments where students feel safe expressing their genuine feelings and comfortable with building empathy and having difficult conversations. Exposing students to the work of artists of diverse backgrounds is essential in establishing inclusivity – students are more likely to feel that what they have to offer will be heard and valued when they can personally identify with specific and successful role models.
I aim to help students discover their own distinct aesthetic sensibilities and cultivate an artistic practice inspired by curiosity for and attentiveness to humanity and the natural world – yet equally as important is developing technical making skills and gaining the necessary interpersonal skills to become leaders and collaborators in a range of artistic, academic, and professional settings. Guiding students towards this mastery of poesis and techne is a form of ongoing education for me – I have come to see teaching as indistinguishable from my research and practice and am routinely surprised and inspired by my students’ insight and creations.
Education does not reveal transcending, universal truths – rather, all knowledge is situated in one’s own perspective and life experiences. In teaching, I favor honesty regarding my positionality over the pretense of objectivity. I treat students not equally but equitably, recognizing that students do not enter classrooms on a level playing field, with some having significantly more experience, education, and opportunity, while others struggle just to make it to class, dealing with family, relationship, or health problems. I see success for students in terms of holistic growth rather than comparative excellence – a student who enters the class great and leaves marginally better is unremarkable; a student who enters with little experience and leaves markedly more capable and empowered is, in my mind, successful.
Navigating the uncertain pathway of interdisciplinary scholarship, I was fortunate to encounter incredibly patient professors who encouraged my exploration of connections between disciplines, even if this exploration did not directly pertain to the coursework at hand. Their flexibility allowed me to discover my passion – how societies tell their histories and espouse their values through visual art and architecture. All this is to say that undergraduates, particularly art students, often have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Only by allowing students the freedom of self-discovery can they find their unique path and passion.