Assessment, Learning & Teaching Reflections |
Friday 20 January, 2006
I’m not very good with flying; in particular I hate small aeroplanes. You can feel every bump, every wobble, every whir. Looking out of the window, I tried to calm down. Below me were dozens of tiny islands. Mottled green and grey full stops, commas, and even in the distance a bracket. No, they aren’t like punctuation marks; that’s far too ephemeral. They’re like Fiona Banner’s punctuation sculptures; raw, heavy, punctuation, with a solidity and physical presence. Do countries often look like punctuation marks? Does Britain ? No. France ? No. Africa ? No. I’m not getting very far here…. My hypothesis is rubbish.
Then, I thought about what I had done. I’d travelled from fear, intense, emotional, irrational fear, nevertheless an emotion that everyone has experienced, to geography, a subject I know almost nothing about, to punctuation and contemporary British Art, subjects I know well. Then I started to think about thinking. Thinking isn’t subject-specific, it isn’t boundaried by specialism, we jump from emotion, to rationality, from subjects we are expert in, to ones we are ignorant of in seconds. Thinking is non-linear, it doesn’t understand disciplinary boundaries, it’s sometimes creative and critical, other times unproductive and, occasionally, ridiculous., like much learning.
Rebekka Kill
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art & Teaching Fellow in Enterprise
