A Bestiary in Masks - Creative Practices and Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Production of Knowledge
Clarice Zdanski, Franklin University Switzerland
Over the past few decades, arts-based research involving the use of creative practices has come to be accepted among transdisciplinary approaches to the production of knowledge. Exhibitions and symposia are some of the ways in which artists collaborate with scientists and researchers in other disciplines and can effectively be incorporated in the studio art course syllabus. A Bestiary in Masks is an example of how this can be done. The project was the culmination of a university travel seminar in which the student participants worked together with a small natural history research museum in Central Italy and a local ceramicist/sculptor to put on an exhibition of glazed terracotta animal masks that they had created during a week’s residence in the artist’s atelier. The seminar also involved intense work on the use of images and on how animals have been studied in the past and continue to be studied in our own era, thus producing a rich body of material for reflection on our current predicament in the Anthropocene era, and expanding the scope of the seminar through transdisciplinary and transhistorical research to raise social awareness for sustainability issues. As a learning experience, the bestiary project is an example of a model in which the journey (to real places as well as within oneself), hands-on experience (workshops and collaboration with institutions and artists), and consciousness raising enable learners to engage in arts-based research and, by discovering their “artist within”, to learn to trust in and exercise their creative powers in producing knowledge.
KEY WORDS: Museum Pedagogy, Creative Practices, Arts-Based Research, Experiential Learning, Artist Within