Dr. Steve Fossey, Ph.D. | Artist | Lecturer | Researcher.
PUBLICATIONS (SELECTED)
LEAP INTO ACTION COMPANION: CRITICAL PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES IN ART & DESIGN EDUCATION (BOOK)
14 Jan. 2020
This companion to Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art & Design Education extends the research and the argumentation addressed in the monograph and provides (further) practical insight into how one might apply performative pedagogy in class, including what performative teaching and learning looks like day to day and what technoparticipation entails. This publication operates as an instruction manual on the sophisticated deployment of performative strategies in practice. Each contribution embraces an easy-to-follow presentation style that starts with a contextual introduction outlining a specific innovative pedagogic performative strategy. The strategy is then laid out as a set of instructions (think Fluxus for teachers), with self-reflective discussion to conclude. This echoes a three-stage learning process: Anticipation, Action and Analysis, a reflective model of practice for you to use and adapt to suit your own practice trajectories.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leap-into-Action-Companion-Performative/dp/1433166445
WAYS TO WANDER (BOOK)
24 July 2015
'Ways to Wander' is your invitation to experiment with a whole range of different ways to 'go for a walk'. Rather than picking up a map and following a footpath, the book offers 54 intriguingly different suggestions, tactics and recollections, all submitted by artists (most of them involved with the Walking Artists Network). There are plenty of ideas you can just go out and try, but others are more performative or explore the psychological, cultural and philosophical aspects of walking Pop the book in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you've been or walks you'd like to do. When the moment takes you, be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply... wander.
LEAP INTO ACTION: CRITICAL PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES IN ART & DESIGN EDUCATION (BOOK)
Jan. 2020
Leap into Action asks: "What happens when performative arts meet pedagogy?" and views performative teaching as building students' understanding of complex ideas and concepts "through action." It provides the theoretical, philosophical, and conceptual terrain by setting forth the scholarly rationale as to what performative pedagogy is at this moment across Art & Design education. Contributions are made from individuals and groups across art and design disciplines who deploy innovative pedagogic approaches with an emphasis on performativity. To underline that Art & Design does not only happen within the institution, Leap into Action provides rich intertextual material that draws upon the experiences of practitioners. Leap into Action is intended to prompt new angles from which to examine one's practice including and beyond pedagogy, mainly in terms of art, design and performance, and disciplines further afield. Whilst Leap into Action engages with performative pedagogies through disruptions, interruptions, tricksters, liminalities, affective bodies, sensory encounters, and technoparticipation, it calls into question what risk-taking means in an arts school context and the tension (even paradox) that exists between wanting to create a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment and provoking students out of their comfort zones through experimental performative pedagogy and playfulness. Whilst engagement with performative strategies may be a 'risky' strategy, the rewards can be great. Enter the unknown, take a leap into action, and have fun.
DRAWING, RESEARCH, PRACTICE, THEORY (JOURNAL)
April. 2019
An imbricated drawing ontology: Economies of pattern, chaos and scale extrapolates material from participation in a project titled ‘A line made by walking without marking the earth’ (2011) which fed into ‘Walking through the field’, part of my practice as research (PAR) Ph.D. titled ‘Site-specific performance and the mechanics of becoming social’ (2018). ‘Walking through the field’ is reworked in this text to present an imbricated drawing ontology that is composed from, and understood through, a process of layering materials generated whilst walking, sharing personal histories and being tracked by satellites. A chaotic assemblage of personal thoughts and memories is layered with the ordering capabilities of the satellites which track movements in space to create drawings from the traces, lines and patterns these technologies generate. The methods used to bring together these traces, lines, patterns and memories seek to articulate a sense of what social scientist Doreen Massey refers to as ‘throwntogetherness’ and speak to what Massey might describe as an ‘ever-shifting constellation of trajectories’. An imbrication of micro and macro events of space and place speak to a purposeful disruption of stable definitions of site, connecting a multiplicity of people, events and specificities to create an imbricated drawing ontology.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/drtp/2019/00000004/00000001
BODY, SPACE& TECHNOLOGY (JOURNAL)
March. 2019
Bites of Passage: Thresholds, Permeability and Hand-Fed Food for Thought discusses two performances created between 2013 and 2014 titled Host and Host(s) that explored how openness and trust are gained through the promise of hospitality. These performances saw strangers open the borders that separate the inside and outside of their bodies to allow hand-fed food to cross their accepting thresholds in return for personal narratives. Openness suggests potential passage into or through something, and here there is literal openness as the permeable body opens to receive the food on the spoon. The body as site becomes accessible once trust has been gained, and an emotional openness plays out as audience-participants both mentally and physically open up to their host.
The article explores social thresholds through the analysis of performance using Marie-Eve Morin and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the conditionality and thresholds of hospitality. Morin comments that the threshold ‘functions both as the place of closure and the place of openness’ (Morin, 2015: 31), and, underpinned by Nick Kaye’s positioning of site as a process rather than fixed location, these movements between being open and closed frame processes of becoming social with strangers. Doreen Massey’s ideas on social ‘throwntogetherness’ are interwoven with this framing as intimate personal details are exchanged through the collision of trajectories in social space. Massey proposes that ‘we understand space as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ (Massey, 2005: 9). This framing of coexistent space converges with Marc Augé’s positioning of place and non-place to propose an interrelationality that opens new dialogues and modes of participation.
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ACTIVATE VOL. 2/ ISSUE 1: FIGURE OF THE SENSIBLE SPECIAL ISSUE: PERFORMING RELATIONS (JOURNAL)
May. 2012
'Steve Fossey is Trying to make more sense in the form of an introduction, beginning, and score of a dialogic performance arranged around the reflections on his project. His following up the ‘Following pieces’ (1969) by Acconci brings us through various flâneurous drifts on the production of private and public spaces and places to a rather unpretentious confession, a handing over of the sense-making to you... the reader' (Greil, 2012).