Connections: Teaching, Art, Life

Connections: Teaching, Art, Life is the third annual Teacher Artmaker Project (TAP) exhibition. The artworks in this exhibition are created by professional artist-teachers who are striving to balance their teaching, art making, and personal lives. Through this research exhibition, 30 early-career teachers explore how these aspects of their daily lives can connect, rather than conflict. This exhibition is important in its own right, in that finding time to make and exhibit art is a challenge to all newly graduated art teachers. This is an important exhibition - it is one part of a larger research project administered by The Melbourne Graduate School of Education. As a consequence, this full-colour catalogue comprises two sections. The first contains reflective statements by the artists, each of whom have articulated how they balance art production and being a teacher, two seemingly disparate worlds. The second contains a research report concerning trends in the Teacher Artmaker Project research data to date. This, then, is a research catalogue that simultaneously celebrates participants’ art making products and their reflections, while placing these into a wider research context relevant to the ‘artist-teacher’ phenomenon.