Viscerality and Slowliness: An Anatomy of Artists' Pedagogies of Material and Time

This paper explores community artists' pedagogies in relation to time and material. Thirteen unstructured interviews were conducted with eight artists under the auspices of an organisation that facilitated community-based workshops in Cambridgeshire, UK throughout 2011 and 2012. Concepts salient to the artists emerged, and six of the eight artists were observed facilitating twenty workshops across five sites. We found that the artists create conditions for open-ended enquiry across five dimensions: space, time, material, body, and language. This paper focuses on one of these dimensions--that of material, with reference to one other, that of time. We discuss artists' criteria for workshop materials, including simplicity, slippage, immediacy, richness, and ephemerality. We examine how the artists presented a "limited palette" of select materials, though provided each in abundance. And we interpret the artists using materials to facilitate what they described as slowliness--an immersive, pleasure state free from past prescription and future expectation.