Drawn Together: An exhibition of life drawing works from Tasmanian teachers and their students

The art education landscape, and indeed, the education landscape more broadly, finds itself navigating complex challenges inside and outside of our classrooms. Teachers grapple with navigating these challenges whilst seeking to maximise and leverage the benefits that digital technologies, space and mediums create for learning. How bodies, and perceptions and articulations of bodies, become implicated in this fast evolving space, is posing increasingly complex challenges for teachers and schools to negotiate. Drawn Together emerges from a space of pedagogical learning and practice that recognises and pays respect to the complex nature of bodies and our relationship with bodies, as situated within the historic artistic discipline of life drawing, which continues to hold as much relevance for learning in the visual arts today and it has done so for centuries. The Tasmanian Art Teachers Association recognises how these challenges can fuel anxiety for education administration, which in turn triggers reactive responses that can lead to constraint or avoidance. The paradox inherent to these challenges is the increasingly unprecedented opportunities for powerful and significant learning in and through visual art that emerge.