ARTicles
Essays, arguments, and studio notes exploring creative education and the practice of making.
I can't draw
Creativity is not a trait some people have. It is a practice, and most of us stop practicing long before we turn fifteen. The decline has been measured since 1968. Nobody causes it deliberately. Assembly is a studio in Mornington built to interrupt it, one course at a time.
He paints the street he walks down
Bobby Bowers paints the street he walks down. Sun faded architecture and the foliage around it, in the suburbs he moves through. Most young people are taught that the subjects worth making work about are somewhere else. He teaches painting at Assembly from Term 1.
The one right answer
Ask a five year old what a paperclip is for and you will get forty answers. Ask a fifteen year old and you will get one. This is not a failure of intelligence, it is a success of training. Schooling rewards retrieval. Generation goes untrained, and unassessed.
Ten students, one project, one term
Ten students, one project, one term, no marks. Every one of those four decisions was made against an easier alternative. Here is the reasoning behind each of them, and what it costs to run a studio this way rather than the obvious way.
One hundred and forty six square metres
One hundred and forty six square metres on the Nepean Highway. Standing benches, open storage so unfinished work stays visible, a glass frontage onto the street, and one wall that stays empty for the whole term until the exhibition goes up.
Term 1 2027
Term 1 2027 opens for enrolment on 1 November 2026. Eight week courses, ten students to a room, taught by working practitioners across drawing, printmaking, photography, film, painting, design, and music and sound. Every course ends in a public exhibition.
What a brayer is for
A brayer is a rubber roller with one job, laying ink down evenly, and it is almost impossible to do well on the first attempt. Knowing when the ink sounds right on the slab is the whole lesson, and it cannot be described usefully in advance.