Not a Snow Fort: Generating new knowledge through socially engaged art pedagogy and research

As a socially engaged artist, I often deploy relational, research-based methodologies to generate artworks that simultaneously function as pedagogical and scholastic output. These projects vary from immersive installations to curated exhibitions and texts but are always guided by the same aim—to enliven a political issue through a creative recasting of a fraught topic in a new form. Recently, I undertook a collaborative, educational, artmaking project with children, which, due to the unseasonably warm winter, transformed from the construction of a Canadiana-inspired snow fort to an investigation of emergency shelters and weather. In this presentation I will discuss that project, unpacking what knowledge was generated when I followed an intuitive, making-centered process that collapsed definitional boundaries of creative and educational practice as research.