Lacuna ~ in collaboration with Turner Contemporary & Arts Education Exchange ~ is a creative network aimed at teachers & educators across the region to share and develop their knowledge and approach to creative learning; underpinned by creativity, curiosity and critical thinking and making use of the cultural context of Thanet. 

We aim to invite an open dialogue across sectors and communities, building on the area’s rich tapestry of history and innovation to nurture a culture of learning. With our combined expertise, knowledge and resources in social practice, education and access we want to open up opportunity, discourse and practice.

Lacuna Events:

Lacuna 9: Unearthing Practice (part 2)

Join Open School East and artist Samara Scott for an evening of making and talking at Open School East’s artist studios. Samara will introduce you to her artistic practice through working with liquid alchemical, image transfer and mark making processes. Participants will use latex and liquid rubbers to make a collaborative and collective textile work, exploring similar processes that were used in Open School Easts Despacito Art School Programme earlier this year.

Throughout the evening we will explore how creativity and artistic practice can inform how we work, teach and connect; Asking: how we can embed artistic practice into everyday learning and teaching? And what do we learn from being an artist?

🗓️ Wednesday 22 May, 5.30PM – 7.00PM (GMT)
📍 Open School East, 39 Hawley Square, Margate CT9 1NY

Samara Scott‘s expansive practice is rooted in a deep research and inquiry into the malleability and mutative nature of materials belonging to contemporary production and waste. Whether its clammy neon-decayed club debris or the prickled effervescence of energy drinks; in these mingling assemblages/tapestries of stockings, sunscreen, foam, broken glass, oils, eyeshadow, goo and gunk, there is a prescient ambience of a post-capital landscape – abstractions, simultaneously sensual and viscous, emerging from the depths of a volatile system of things, of objects, commodities and conditions.

Lacuna 8: Unearthing Practice

Join artist Nicolas Deshayes and Open School East for an evening of making and talking at Open School East’s artist studios. Throughout the evening we will explore how creativity and artistic practice can inform teaching practice. Asking how we can embed artistic practice into everyday learning and teaching? And what do we learn from being an artist?

Date: Wednesday 28 February 2024
Time: 5.30PM – 7.00PM
Venue: Open School East, 39 Hawley Square, CT9 1NY

Nicolas Deshayes is an artist living in Dover, Kent. He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture (2009) after completing a BA in Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design London (2005).  He makes sculpture from a wide range of processes and materials including cast metals, factory ceramics and vitreous enamel. Drawing on the history and temperature of these processes, he explores the relationship between industrialisation and the human body.

Lacuna 7: Pedagogy of Trust

This practical workshop will position improvising as a tool for learning and developing self trust. Sound and visual arts activity (no experience required) will also provoke conversation and help us to examine the role of improvising in education today.

Lead by Arts Education Exchange

Date: Wednesday 10 January

Time: 6.15PM – 8.00PM

Venue: Turner Contemporary – Rendezvous, Margate CT9 1HG

Lacuna 6: Look Club

An introduction to Look Club – a conversational workshop for adults that can be replicated in classrooms and with groups about any topic or theme.

During this event, the Look Club team will reflect on their learnings over the last 3 years and relationships formed through Age UK Thanet and the Pilgrims Hospice.

Look Club is informal and relaxed and no prior knowledge is needed.

Date: Wednesday 29 November

Time: 6.15PM – 8.00PM

Venue: Turner Contemporary – Rendezvous, Margate CT9 1HG

Lacuna 5:

You are invited to build a community! 

Join us in a practical workshop exploring the ways that creative learning can help us to create possibilities for social connection and shared transformation. 

Arts Education Exchange staff will lead fun activities providing an insight into their approach to learning with marginalised communities with some practical takeaways to implement in any learning setting.

Date: Wednesday 12 July

Time: 5.30PM – 7.30PM

Venue: Turner Contemporary – Rendezvous, Margate CT9 1HG

Lacuna 4:

Join Open School East Artistic Director Polly Brannan & Super Slow Way Director, Laurie Peake for the fourth Lacuna session that considers the Artist’s Role in Society, exploring the question:

What happens when artists are embedded and working with & not for local communities?

Date: Wednesday 26 April 2023

Time: 5.30pm – 7.30pm

Venue: Turner Contemporary

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Through the session, Laurie Peake will present two key innovative social practice models & artworks that have become some of the most significant social practice works in the UK today which include Jeanne van Heeswijk’s 2up2down (Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial) which created the Community Land Trust and bakery, Homebaked, in Liverpool, where the community took matters into their own hands to re-imagine and reclaim their homes. Also, US artist and pioneer of public art and socially engaged practice, Suzanne Lacy’s Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope (commissioned by Super Slow Way) that looks at how a post industrial town comes together in extraordinary ways, over 3 years to create a mass participation artwork at Brierfield Mill, Pendle. We will explore communities & young people’s perception of where they live & what change they can make, carving out their own future, on their own terms.

Laurie Peake is a curator who works with artists to help people transform their own neighbourhoods in projects such as Suzanne Lacy’s Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope in Pendle, UK and Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s 2Up 2Down in Liverpool, UK. She is currently Director of Super Slow Way, a cultural development organisation which is one of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programmes, located along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal corridor in East Lancashire. Previously, Laurie was Programme Director at Liverpool Biennial for 10 years, where she developed strategic partnerships to deliver temporary and permanent commissions with international artists in public spaces across Merseyside. Projects such as Antony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach, Jaume Plensa’s Dream and Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s 2Up2Down which created the Community Land Trust and bakery, Homebaked, in Liverpool, were all notable for their transformative effects.

Lacuna 3:

Join us for the Lacuna preview of Feeling Her Way where Sonia Boyce will give a short talk about their work and exhibition.

This event is led by Turner Contemporary and we have a range of learning opportunities for you to get involved with. Our engagement assistants will share our workshop activities and gallery games that we use as tools to help us engage and understand the artwork.

Date: Wednesday 1 February 2023

Time: 5.00pm – 7.00pm

Venue: Turner Contemporary

Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way. Commissioned by the British Council for the British Pavilion, the installation combines video, collage, music and sculpture to present a body of work that centres around the vocal experimentation of five Black female musicians.

The commission expands on Boyce’s ‘Devotional Collection’, built over 20 years and spanning more than three centuries, which honours the substantial contribution of Black British female musicians to public life and transnational culture.

Lacuna 2:

Join London based artist Shenece Oretha as they share their recent work work made in collaboration with Open School East’s Despacito Art School children and Iniva’s Drift Pavilion, a series of radical re-imaginings of Europeanness which reflect on the entanglement between land and water, movement and m/otherlands, in the forging of new identities and subjectivities. Shenece will share their values, experience and approach to arts education whilst questioning the gap between visible and invisible spaces and routes to art and education.

Date: Wednesday 7 December 2022

Time: 5.00pm – 7.00pm

Venue: Turner Contemporary

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Shenece Oretha is a London based multidisciplinary artist sounding out the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice.

Lacuna 1:

The first session of Lacuna will consist of an introduction talk from all 3 organisations and a workshop led by Arts Education Exchange.

Date: Wednesday 19 October

Time: 5.00pm – 7.30pm

Venue: Turner Contemporary

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Lacuna, a new learning Network for Educators, Teachers, Artists and Arts Professionals across the region to share and develop their knowledge and approach to creative learning. Lacuna is being led by 3 artist organisations; Arts Education Exchange, Open School East and Turner Contemporary.

Join us for our first session at Turner Contemporary for the intro to the network and a workshop: What’s the problem with creativity? led by Arts Education Exchange.