The highlight speaker for me was artist Julie Rrap. I considered myself quite familiar with her work however this presentation gave me so much information about works from her various exhibitions which really helped me understand her and value the work even more. I found her concepts so inspiring, particularly the way her work chronicles an aging woman in its self-portrait style, which brings another layer of meaning to the pieces. One of these recent works, Write Me (2022) had a powerful quote: “when we are silentwe are still afraid, so we are better to speak.”
Having picked two sculptural workshopsI thoroughly enjoyed doing these with other members of the AENT and would not have found them as satisfying by myself. Being able to exchange ideas and laugh with small failures meant this exercise was even more rewarding. One of the takeaways from the talks for me was that in teaching Art you can inspire and teach techniquesbut students need to find the drive within, so an important part of this process is to “create desire in oneself”- self motivation, and help students to do this. “You can’t use up creativity, the more you use the more you have.” (Maya Anderson)
Another quote which I found powerful was: “creativity is the process of using imagination and critical thinking to generate new ideas that have value.” This was the final speaker of the conference who also highlighted that non creativebehaviouris learned.
I loved these two days of professional development and will definitely try to participate next year.