The Factory Art School (2019—)
By
Morgan Tipping
Photograph of Factory Art School artists wearing their own workwear. Photography credit: Tommy Chavannes
An alternative art school co-created by artist Morgan Tipping and over 180 neuro and mobility diverse creatives across Nottinghamshire from inside a historic Workhouse.
From July 2019- January 2020 artist Morgan Tipping co-created The Factory alternative art school with 180 neurodiverse and mobility diverse children, young people and adults from across Nottinghamshire at The Workhouse, Southwell.
The Factory curriculum foregrounded social relationships, experimental processes and sought to disrupt the biopolitical way that power was encoded into social practices in the past and influence people in the present. In State of Insecurity (2015) Isabel Lorey states that Neoliberal governing works by regulating the minimum of assurance while increasing instability. Judith Butler adds that the precarity this causes constitutes a form of regulation that extends to the way we govern ourselves. Our contemporary experience of biopolitics is bound up in neoliberal conceptions of choice and identity. Within a culture that celebrates public individualism- the individualist identity of a person labelled as disabled may be less vulnerable to exploitation. The disability is however subject to various forms of external precarity (social, economic and political).
The rhizomatic structure of The Factory art school challenges the politics of victimization. The Factory and Do It Different projects seek a more empowering identity for groups experiencing precarity. This is a consistent aim of my practice and has underpinned the work I’ve co-created with displaced people in refugee camps and residents in care homes. In The uses of democracy (1992), Jacques Rancière defines genuine participation as the ‘invention of an unpredictable subject’. Foregrounding social relations and process over product is an instrumental part of investigating and reconfiguring the politics of living together. As Beth Williamson states in The London Art Schools; Reforming the Art World 1960 to Now (2015) ‘you don’t make artists, you simply make opportunities for them’.
Throughout the Do It Different projects The Factory artists have demonstrated their need for greater creative opportunities and the immense artistic power that is generated when collaborating with them.
More information: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/the-workhouse-southwell/features/trust-new-art-at-the-workhouse
You can watch a video introducing The Factory Art School below:
A video of ‘Biorhythms Sound Collaborations’
A video about ‘The Do It Different Movement Project’
