Lisa Peake
Learning Through Gift Cycles
This research began from a noticing that handmade objects created often do not remain with their makers. They are frequently given away to form and acknowledge bonds with others. Gifts can bind, but they can also compel; they can create intimacy while at the same time reinforcing asymmetries.
Starting from this observation within Kunstlab+Buren, a free walk-in atelier for children in Rotterdam South where I have worked as an artist and art pedagogue for over five years, I examine how practices of gifting function as sites of pedagogical encounter. What they reveal about relational and affective learning within making practices. How acts of gifting and delay generate conditions for learning that cannot be planned or purchased.
Through sustained encounters with my collaborators, this research attends to the gift’s own temporality…how it sets its own pace, moves toward where a relation has actually formed, keeps the marks of its making visible. What emerges is an attentiveness to what a gift-based understanding of art education can hold and what it cannot.