1 Studio Practice as a State of Mind: A/r/tographic Commitments as a Way of Being

• Main Author: Rita L. Irwin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Canada; Pacific; glacier; Iceland; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.525.2087; http://knowhow.is/newtypo/fileadmin/templates/main/images/DISSEMINATION/ICELAND PAPER Rita.pdf

Thank you for inviting me to your beautiful country and to your remarkable project. It is such a pleasure to learn about other projects and to visit other lands. The extraordinary talent that exists within humanity always humbles me. I invite all of you to visit me in Vancouver Canada one day. I thought I would share a few slides of Vancouver so that you could see where I live. Vancouver is on the westcoast of Canada with the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Rockie Mountains to the north and east. We are a half hour drive from the US border and a 3 hour drive from Seattle Washington. I’ve lived in Vancouver for 15 years and in Canada all of my life. Before coming to the University of British Columbia, I lived & worked in Ontario but my strongest roots are in Alberta where I grew up on a dry land grain farm. Looking at the Canadian map, the province of Newfoundland is roughly the same size of Iceland. Canada and Iceland are similar in a couple of areas: 11 % of Iceland is covered by glacier while 12 % of Canada is covered by water (lakes, rivers, etc.). Iceland is one of the most geologically active areas on the Earth, as is the Pacific northwest of Canada. Vancouver is beautiful and invite all of you to join us for the 2010 winter Olympics. But I should return to the project that we are all focusing on today. Let me begin by summarizing what I think I have learned about your pedagogical project. Project KNOWHOW is a European Union funded Leonardo da Vinci project focused on the practices that take place within the ceramic studio environment. KNOWHOW asserts that studio education is a pedagogical model with creativity at its core. KNOWHOW is an extraordinarily ambitious project linking six partners across four countries and three land