Teaching period: 4.02.2020-7.02.2020 and 11.02.2020-14.02.2020 inclusive.
Teacher(s): Fergus Feehily and guests
ECTS: 2-3
Number of available place for KUNO students: 2
Level: MA
Requirements: Some pre-reading, which will be set by early January 2020; a short presentation by the student and the completion of a visual essay; curiosity, openness; and complete commitment to the course timetable.
The course takes place over two weeks in Helsinki, the students will make a presentation during this time and complete a visual essay in the form of a PDF that will be submitted a week after the course finishes to all the participants. 2 credits will be awarded for the course time and presentation, 1 credit for the visual essay.
Due to the nature of the course is crucial that all members of the group are present at all times.
Application deadline: 9 December
How to apply: Please send a short word letter of motivation to kuva.international@uniarts.fi.
Maximum 500 words, on one single A4 sheet PDF plus 3 images of your work, in PDF or video or soundfile if necessary.
Course description:
A period of reading, listening, watching, discussion and making for two weeks in the darkness of the early part of the year.
Feehily’s Far from the Tree courses have been running since 2016, this is the fifth course in the series and likely the last. You do not have to have taken part in any previous course, they are both independent and related. This course is an opportunity to pause, to take time out of your own everyday studio activity. It is a reading group, a place in which to share and think about motivations, the bigger questions relating to your work or practice, to make things and drink tea.
In these courses, themes arise, rather like emergent properties. Some of this is planned but is also dependent on the group and the discussion that arises due to the course. The subtitle of this course, against the dying light comes from the Dylan Thomas poem Do not go gentle into that goodnight, which was written in 1947 but first published in 1951.
The first Far from the Tree originally took its title from the deeply empathetic book by Andrew Solomon, a book which has no obvious relationship with visual art but is concerned with the mystery of where do we come from, where do children who are in some way “different” originate, how do they relate to their families and their families to them. It is a book about understanding. While only loosely associating with this text, the courses attempt to examine our own motivations, but known to us and the not so obvious. Previous Far from the Tree courses have involved Yasujiro Ozu’s films, Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost, Derek Jarman’s Blue, the mystery of Scott Walker, the work of Daphne Oram, the writing of W.G. Sebald and getting lost within James Joyces’s Ulysses.
Amongst many others, Viv Albertine, Elizabeth Bishop, The Screamers, Sister Corita Kent, the world of Eugene and Marie Von Bruenchenhein, Penny Rimbaud and The Bridge by John Hutchison will all come up in this intensive course.
Image title: Ivor Cutler and Jessie Robins on the Magical Mystery Tour bus, 1967
