I collaborated with artist Katherine Rae Diemert to develop a workshop titled Critique as Gift which we first presented at the Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA) conference in Halifax in 2024. We plan to offer this workshop again. If you are interested in taking this workshop or in having us deliver at your organization/school, please get in touch.
Here is the workshop description:
Through this workshop we invite you to join us in developing and experimenting with alternative structures of critique. By considering how permission to play can expand on traditional methods, this session will offer strategies to bring back to the classroom. Traditionally, to offer our work up for critique asks us to be vulnerable, and as the critic, to operate from a space of extremes. We contend that by developing strategies through the use of everyday objects, prepositions as tools, and embodied techniques we begin to turn to new and unexpected ways of doing critique.
Working from Terry Barrett’s concepts of description, interpretation and (in our words) evaluation as a structure, we embrace “soft talk” (Leslie Dick, 2018) and begin to engage in reciprocity with each other. This workbook is a companion guide to workshop activities, with room for your own notes and resources for further exploration afterwards.
We invite you to think-through with us what we really need from critique and how critique could be offered as a gift.