antonia aitken
Teaching practice.
I am a skilled and passionate art educator. I have spent the past 15 years working in higher education, teaching and developing tertiary curriculum in printmaking, drawing and critical practices. I have worked in the community arts sector for 20 years, designing and delivering high-quality, experiential studio and field-based learning experiences for and in collbaoraiton with diverse community groups. Below are some of the community projects I have designed and delivered in recent years. Please get in touch to organise a workshop or learn more about my teaching approach.
Working with First Nations communities with Basil Hall Editions (BHE)
In recent months I have been working with BHE taking our printmaking and artist development workshops to Waringarri Arts in Kununurra, WA and Waralungku Arts in Boroloola, NT.
Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment, University of Tasmania
in 2017 I designed and delivered a series of outreach workshops for young people in regional and remote schools in the Derwent Valley region of Tasmania. We focused on notions of self identity through portraiture and looked at the long legacy of self portraiture in Australian art history. How do portraits tell a story of both the individual and of ones culture and society more broadly? The workshops had two key focuses. Firstly, to support schools to engage with the Young Archies youth portrait award held each year at the University of Tasmania, and secondly, to develop outreach programs that introduced new ways of making art led by professional creative practitioners and creating pathways for future univerity study.
Artist-in-Schools programs - Evatt Primary, Canberra
The artsACT Artist-in-Schools Project that I delivered at Evatt Primary School in Canberra in 2013 was aimed at giving students and staff an opportunity to work with a practicing artist and to be introduced to new printmaking and drawing approaches. Over 9 weeks I worked with 14 primary and 2 pre-school classes (over 350 young people), through a series of day-long workshops. These workshops explored their connection to the school environment, with each class taking a walk around the school grounds with me to collect plants and found objects that then became the inspiration for both the drawing and printmaking exercises back in the studio. The final artwork that I made for the school was a series of large-scale screenprinted fabric designs for the foyer space as a permanent artwork to clebrate the Schools 40th Anniversary. The designs were made using the young peoples ink drawings as the source material and guiding the colour and form.
​
