Main menu
Staff & students

Centre for Arts and Learning Events

Recordings of past events and links to register for upcoming events are here

Primary page content

Stories of Change, Centre for Arts and Learning 2025-26 

Beginning in the middle of things with a view of becoming curious, learning in arts practice can be seen in processes of ‘storying’. Artists story what it feels like to be making, thinking, gathering and reflecting with others – getting into new dimensions. There are themes, threads and entanglements of discoveries and decisions. In 2025-26 Centre for Arts and Learning is focusing on Stories of Change. We will be inviting practitioners, practice researchers and cultural organisations to reflect on how artists and educators make choices about the information they create and share, when this happens and how it happens.  

Stories can intone excitement, tension, twists, turning points and revelations – encouraging deeper listening. Artworks in the making might be re-drawn, re-made, re-woven and repositioned - changing many times before their forms are shown – before they can even be interpreted. Stories of change are temporal journeys ‘in time’ as Rita Irwin says (2013, 199), and are sometimes in time to make a social change; but they are also asynchronous gatherings of matter that integrate errors and improvisation. They may be autoethnographic, or seeking to create bridges with diverse communities in ‘restorative practice’ (Bhandari 2018), and ‘multispecies collectives’ in mind-body-environment ‘worldmaking’ (Padberg 2022, 267).  

Arts narratives can be collected and curated, making diffractive links with one-another. Stories can be quietly spoken in their subtle impact, or loud as a storming crowd protesting to be heard. With hindsight we can see how things might have been different, but how can we also value those stages and changes in direction along the way – choosing what to record and what to leave in the hinterlands of backstory. Could art education in some ways be viewed as ‘storytelling training’? (Zusman 2018, 85). 

In 2025-26 Centre for Arts and Learning will explore how narratives of arts practice meet with the emotional and physical difficulties of creative actions, also reflecting on how historical concepts of arts, craft and design education have changed. For artists and educators, stories can be processes for making courage to blaze a trail - so that the trail continues to be visible, and to form practice dialogues of past, present and future. 

References 

Bhandari, A. (2018) Restorative Practice: Developing a Community of Storytellers. Teaching Artist Journal, 16(3-4) 100-105. DOI: 10.1080/15411796.2018.1535645 

Irwin, R. (2013) Becoming A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 54(3), 198-215. DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894 

Padberg, C. (2022) WERT: Interspecies Weaving and Becoming, in I. Bencke and J. Bruhn (Eds.), Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices (267-278). Punctom Books.  

Zusman, A. (2018) Listen: The Defeat of Oppression by Expression. In M. Capous-Desyllas and K. Morgaine (Eds.) Creating Social Change Through Creativity Anti-Oppressive Arts-Based Research Methodologies, (77-93). Palgrave Macmillan. 

 

Upcoming events

There are currently no upcoming events.

Past events

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020