Plymouth College of Art and Rame Projects have worked together in 2019 and 2020 to collaboratively develop three day residencies for some of its Masters student cohorts across fine art and design courses. Workshops in 2019 were led by Rame Directors Beth Emily Richards and Lucy Stella Rollins, by PCA staff Steven Paige and Kim Charnley, and by artists Dave Beech and Sophie Mellor. In 2020, workshops were led by Rame Directors Beth Emily Richards and Lucy Stella Rollins, and by Rame Projects alumni artists Natalie Raven, Huhtamaki Wab, and Georgia Gendall, with artist and curator Simon Lee Dicker of OSR Projects.
Thank you so much for our recent residency experience at Rame, which left me buzzing. I greatly appreciated the mix of imaginative academic planning, emergence, social connection and small but important practical details. And it was really fun!
The mix of provocations and experiences which you brought together made for stimulating art education. It also went beyond that as a superb example of “learning outside the classroom”. I talked a lot, but I also noticed, took part in and overheard quite a lot of informal but thoughtful spin-off conversations about our practices and concerns going on all through the weekend. In my view this type of polyphony is less common within the college setting. The residency offered us many of the benefits of learning outside the classroom, and was an excellent example of ‘drawing on the elements of restorative places’:
“The elements of restorative places are outlined by Kaplan (1995) as: (a) being away – need a place other than the source of the fatigue; (b) extent – a place that is different, whole, has coherence; (c) fascination – a place that relates to thinking, doing, wondering, figuring out things, predicting and recognizing; (d) compatibility – a place that is a good fit to one’s inclinations (Kaplan, 1995: 174). “
Sarah Scaife, PCA Masters Student and Artist