Return to January 2006 Funded Projects

Pedagogic research into practice based forms of documentation and evaluation of art making and learning for undergraduate arts students and students with learning disabilities.

Alice Fox

'Overalls evaluation' is an innovative evaluation process for students that will be trialled during the practical art sessions on the University of Brighton, Faculty of Arts and Architecture 'Access to Art' extension study to be held at The Phoenix Arts Association.

Access to Art is a validated level two course for University of Brighton undergraduates who are given the opportunity to work with the "Rockets" group of artists with learning disabilities. This course runs as 10 full day, weekly sessions over the spring term 2006. Attending the course will be 8 University students and 8 artists with learning disabilities (a2a Rockets artist group). Each University student will work with one a2a Rocket artist to experiment with different art- making mediums.

The 'overalls evaluation' project has been devised so that it can be delivered alongside, and integral to, the access to art course. During the access to art sessions everyone in the room will be wearing white cotton overalls as protective clothing. As well as gathering the marks and traces of the days activities this protective clothing also has the potential to provide a blank canvas for thoughtful documentation of the day's creative processes and ideas. This has already begun to happen informally in previous sessions (see photo) and we would like the opportunity to develop it more systematically in order to look at the possibilities for developing it into a useful reflective tool.