What is the importance of an 'aesthetic education'? How can we develop an understanding of the visual and material world? How do we perceive and translate our experience into new forms?
Play Sense is an exhibition, series of performative workshops and a symposium exploring connections between learning and documentation focusing on the idea of 'aesthetic education'. The title is taken from Friedrich Schiller's 'On the Aesthetic Education of Man' (1775). Play Sense explores the value of learning through doing and how materials lead experience can be represented through image and text.
The exhibition presents works developed by Fay Nicolson as part of her residency at Eltham College & Gerald Moore Gallery. Works include a series of large-scale, rhythmic screen-prints connecting to textiles and the body. These print/paintings form the visual and architectural backdrop for photographic works that explore the possibility of developing an embodied aesthetic understanding through play and repeated gestures.
During the exhibition Gerald Moore Gallery will be used as a project space to develop new photographic works. The large screen prints function as elements in a shifting installation that will house performative scenarios. Within this set Nicolson plays with the visual and material language she has developed during her residency, working with other artists/performers to explore aesthetic experience, embodied knowledge and how it can be recorded.
Play Sense was accompanied by a symposium on Saturday 23 May 2015.
Play Sense is kindly supported by Arts Council England.