storyboard poetics and pedagogic process (Kym Maxwell + imagery Collingwood College Theatre Troupe) 26 May – 1 Jul 2017, West Space Gallery

storyboard poetics and pedagogic process, 26 May – 1 Jul 2017, West Space Gallery

Kym Maxwell with imagery Collingwood College Theatre Troupe

In this exhibition I present a mono-directional artistic response to a qualitative theatre work I co-directed as a state school educator, two years prior with a class of eight to ten-year-old students at an inner city primary school. The teaching and learning ephemera is repositioned in an artists’ gaze, becoming interlocutor to the details of its production. The theatre work A Wharfie’s Story (2015) is a tale of Jim Beggs AOM and his wife Tui’s commitment to improved working conditions for waterside workers in Australia (since the 50’s). It was co-written and performed live by the Collingwood College Theatre Troupe at Melbourne’s North Wharf in November, 2015. By exposing my pedagogical process and the students’ learning –through drawings, notes and event photography – I highlight one form of a shared learning labour and question the ethical and aesthetic realm of making a pedagogic project visible. Thus uncovering the polemic of top-down arts management of a shared cultural production by artists and how this work may sit within social-engaged arts’ unresolved politics. The artifacts of production are re-represented in a visual storyboard and through sculpture. The immersive display seeks to celebrate children’s labour as connected to the pedagogic and artistic, as informative, intellectual and cultural. A further critical reflection of the projects complexities A Wharfie’s Story - play, protest, consequence and strengths is offered by Lisa Radford, Jim Beggs and Rosemary Forde in the forthcoming publication ‘The Consequence’, designed by Paul Mylecharane and Beaziyt Worou of Public Office.

Kym Maxwell is an artist, teacher, curator and writer whose work across these fields concerns notions of education and social spaces. Maxwell‘s research explores rights, risk and friction within societal structures with a focus on the interpersonal. Maxwell takes an interest in the intersection of social relations, installation and art presentation within public and institutional settings. She challenges motorised response to art through context with humanistic inquiry a central concern. Her research has involved sociology, pedagogy and curation. She seeks to present relational and institutional frameworks through exploring her understanding of their architecture, territories and language.