Outside Intervention and the External Studio

This paper presentation introduces a recent teaching and learning collaboration between the Textile team at the University of Huddersfield and the Packhorse Shopping Centre in Huddersfield. Through an engagement in temporary studio and workshop spaces in the Centre the presentation showcases the teaching and learning materials designed for this collaboration including examples of student work, both written and practice-oriented.
The presentation discusses three features of this collaborative project:
Firstly, it discusses new forms of community derived workshops and interventionist approaches generated out of an encounter with spaces in The Packhorse Centre. Through this engagement Textile students were encouraged to expand their thinking and making by encountering vacant spaces in the Centre itself.
Secondly, it explores how an accompanying lecture programme helped students to respond to environmental and social practices. By positioning themselves as thinking and writing practitioners, students sought to explore how textile practitioners and artists work with and through socially engaged practices with an emphasis on interventionist projects.
Finally the presentation examines opportunities for reciprocal learning methods to inform students’ ongoing analysis and reflection of their work. Through the orchestration of a series of inter-year group workshops at The Packhorse Centre students encounter socially engaged and participatory ventures from a participant’s and textile practitioner’s perspective.
In this respect, the presentation showcases how students, staff and external organisations can become shared partners in new and experimental teaching and learning experiences that use or subvert notions of the traditional textiles studio in extreme and conceptual ways.