Welcome to Liveness

This has been an extraordinary year.

Liveness celebrates the work and successes of our students this year and showcases how the culture of the school thrived in new ways while our buildings remain closed during the Covid-19 emergency.

So, the 2020 Summer Show is different.

Exceptional objects, drawings, garments, photographs, artefacts are here but the exhibited work describes far more. In the context of viral, economic, social, and political challenges the presentations here give our students’ work a different status. The work seems now to be so much greater in scope and importance. It reflects a period that has impacted upon our professional, intellectual and social consciousness and, most recently, on the school’s own identity.

In conceiving of Liveness, Joseph Kohlmaier, set the scene as a place of exchange, an opportunity to work through and between our community of diverse practitioners, a place to cross and actively explore the threshold between the physical and virtual worlds of the school.

The creative practice students have engaged with to achieve this, the scenes and settings, the adjustments and responses to working remotely are seen, establishing a narrative through which we can share and learn about each other’s practice.

Liveness, like the content it presents and the context it reflects, is customized and complex and affirms a recognition and an expectation that we all have a responsibility to listen, to contest, to evaluate, to act.

And so, we must change.

Creativity, in which ever of the school’s disciplines, assumes a means of thinking differently, of working from another viewpoint. That imagination, now more than ever, must resist the comfort of the familiar and be outward in its reference, outward in seeking ideas, outward in addressing its constituency and accountable for the change it seeks.

Liveness is and will continue to be a portal to the life, culture and creativity in the school. A place to visit and explore and test ideas and enact that transformation.

This will be an extraordinary year.

Andy Stone

June 2020