What is foundational here? – the role of love in art and design education

In 2023 Dr Ekua McMorris, Nathan Francois-Cull and I co-convened the Love in Conversation panel at the PARSE conference, Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection. This biennial artistic research conference, held at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, explored the scope of love in its meanings and manifestations. On the first morning of the conference, a group of delegates each read out loud a line of Audre Lorde’s reverberatory text, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’. The text tenderly calls upon its readers to break the silences which often discriminate and immobilise movement.

On the Graduate Diploma in Art & Design, as part of our teaching and learning, we also rehearse Audre Lorde’s text. As part of our curriculum, in one of the final interdisciplinary workshops, we invite students to perform the text in their own way, line by line in concert. This is in preparation for their own performance of statements that conjure the identities and dispositions, sensibilities and ambitions of the interdisciplinary group.

I mention this in response to the question: what is foundational here? for a few reasons. The College continues to shape-shift, and as ever, our many multiple worlds of work and life, practice and research, necessitate lightening-speed responses in our curricula. Importantly, the words of Lorde reverberate heavily and affect us. They are impossible to avoid, or look away from, especially in art and design education.

Recently I have been interested in how, where, why and when love is mobilised in art and design education, as an affective infrastructure. From Lorde, we learn of the importance of love at work, when language and action become practices of love. At the RCA – in my experience of teaching, learning and pedagogy – dialogue, practices of equity, solidarity, and organisation can be formed through this casting of love; when love is defined as an ethic which is based on what bell hooks frames in All About Love (2001) as, “showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate”.

And it is with these ideas that our pedagogy on the Graduate Diploma seems to move. In a way love, dialogue, confidence, and coherence exist as the coordinates of our work at the university. As an interdisciplinary programme which premises the configuration of practice – encouraging intensive conceptual and material experimentation and exploration, critical reflection and positioning, and preparation for what might be next – the Graduate Diploma shares much in common with Foundation Art & Design programmes, and equivalents in the Ground, Basic and Preparation courses, as well as their alternatives.

Students join the Graduate Diploma programme with many different backgrounds; whether taking a break from industry, non-art and design contexts, or their professional lives, or wanting to change careers entirely, or straight from undergraduate programmes in art and design. Students work to configure a practice; lay the foundations for postgraduate study, or for a shift in career direction.

The RCA’s Graduate Diploma team were invited to collaborate with colleagues from University of the Arts Helsinki and the International Network of Foundation Educators (INFE) on INFE’s third international symposium, with a focus on the foundational qualities of foundation art and design education, in a post-pandemic context. INFE’s ongoing commitment to the preservation of the range, vitality, histories and importance of foundation art and design education, with a current focus on the archive/al, resonated with much of our ongoing work and conversation on the Graduate Diploma. This lead us to question just what is foundational here and now, and especially how in our work across the College in postgraduate art and design education, we can connect to the many variations and modalities of teaching and learning in art and design.

FOUNDATIONAL is a three-day symposium, organised between the Graduate Diploma programme, University of the Arts Helsinki and INFE. It brings together many voices, practices and encounters from across foundation art and design education, its equivalents and alternatives, and critical pedagogies, to address just what is foundational about art and design education. It asks: what experiences have stayed with people and continue to shape their personal, professional, and creative lives; what aspects of foundational pedagogy have translated to other levels of education; and how, as teachers and learners, we might begin to archive these experiences and encounters — how do we learn from the archival?

FOUNDATIONAL is as much about addressing these questions and materialising meaningful action from them, as it is about re/considering our responsibilities and modes of accountability in art and design education. Not only out of interest, but as a necessity, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, in the 2020 essay ‘Critical theory in times of crisis’, that “what is political motion one moment becomes not even in the next a new curricular object.” It is this proximity between political motion and curricula that I believe we must continually remind ourselves. And what better place to start than foundational pedagogy. This is a kind of quantum space of art and design teaching and learning that firmly places us all on something of an event horizon of love; unlearning and learning, reflection, doing and thinking, and importantly takes the form of an invitation.

With these few things in mind, day one of the symposium in June was about learning from practices of the archive/s from the National Art Education Archives, RCA archive and special collections, the Nordic School of Art, and personal and discipline-specific archives. It also invited us to think otherwise about the archival as political practice, as activism, and as equity building in its formation, maintenance, scholarship, sensibility and as an approach to thinking and knowing.

Dr Ekua McMorris’ keynote presentation was another tender call to remind us of the empowerment and magic of the community of learners, as she remarked that “between the lines of course handbook[s] lay the intangible richness of a programme that speaks of a cultivation of people from all walks of life”.

Ekua McMorris, ‘I could have been a midwife’, FOUNDATIONAL keynote presentation day one, “ARCHIVES”, Royal College of Art, London, Tuesday 18 June 2024

Days two and three of the symposium, taking place on 29–30 August at the RCA's White City campus, are open to all. They bring together a group of international educators, practitioners, organisers, and researchers to think together, share resonant foundational narratives and experiences and workshop methods and practices.