“storyboard poetics and pedagogic process”
Kym Maxwell
26 May → 1 July 2017

Kym Maxwell with imagery from The 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 and strengths is offered by Lisa Radford, Jim Beggs and Rosemary Forde in the forthcoming publication ‘The Consequence’, designed by Robert Janes.