Intrafaith Futures and the Materiality of Creative Learning

• In Event: Arts as Public Pedagogy: The Necessity of Engagement With Arts as Public Education

Abstract

Objectives

To theorize the imaginative effects and bodily affects of a visual art research program that employs arts practice as a way of learning about different faiths. Through art practices, young people create images of what I call 'intra-faith futures'. I focus on the materiality of creative learning as an agent for change and a means of creating shared understandings.

Theoretical framework

The materiality of making is core to the process of expression and to the creation of intra-faith futures. The agency of materiality has formed a particular focus of new materialist feminist thought across the past decade and has, in other ways, been acknowledged within art theory for many more years. For example, early work on relational aesthetics, developed by theorists such as Nicholas Bourriaud, described art modelled on human relations and their social context. Bourriaud saw artists as facilitators or activators, rather than makers, and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewer. This approach has been problematized, largely because the artist was presented by Bourriaud as someone who gives audiences ‘access’ to power. Responding to critiques of Bourriaud's position, the term 'socially engaged practice' can (but does not always) describe art that is collaborative, participatory, and involves people as the ‘medium’ or material of the work.

Methodology

My project extends definitions of such socially engaged practices to involve faith or belief as a core material of the art work. Making diffractive, or many different, enmeshed understandings of faith, is the purpose of my arts workshops. Through undertaking socially engaged arts practices that work with faith and belief as the material of art that is crafted and re-shaped as a collective intra-faith subjectivity, the interfaith childhoods project creates new epistemic communities. Building on histories of feminist labour and activism contained in feminist theory and art practice, the project looks to remake aspects of the social to constitute an intra-active, intra-faith collective mattering of faith relations and experiences of multicultural urban space.

Data sources

Drawing mainly on data from 6 UK sites of a trans-national, multi-sited empirical study, I show that collaborative art making can express attachments and forms of relationality that are not able to be expressed in words by the children and young people with whom I work.

Scholarly significance

First ever new materialist theorization of interfaith arts practices. Consideration of arts making as a materialist public pedagogy. Links made between affect and the imagination, affect and possibility and potential. New empirical arts based educational research presented.

Author

• Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody, RMIT University