‘Becoming a work of art’ revisited: Ecologies of collaboration in tertiary visual arts education1

Abstract

Collaboration continues to be a growing focus of teaching, learning and research in university art departments. We are also witnessing a turn towards ecological and multispecies approaches in contemporary arts practice and education across the university sector and creative industries. In this revisitation of our earlier work, we ask how the transition into ecological understandings of collaboration might disrupt and reorientate humanist ontologies of visual arts education in the university. We draw on posthumanist and new materialist theories to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that are responsive to the ecological entanglements that comprise a work of art under current climatological and biodiversity crises. From there we develop a cartographic analysis of collaborative works of art in the making, drawing on a year-long participatory study with third-year undergraduate art students. In the final section we revisit our proposition for ‘becoming a work of art’ through more-than-human collaboration and explore the implications of this concept for speculative pedagogic practice and curriculum making in arts education.