Benjamin Fallon – Ruth Ewan https://www.ruthewan.com Visual Artist, Glasgow Mon, 22 Jan 2024 16:35:12 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0.8 https://www.ruthewan.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/cropped-cropped-NoLandlordsYouFools-Custom-32x32.png Benjamin Fallon – Ruth Ewan https://www.ruthewan.com 32 32 Asking Out https://www.ruthewan.com/asking-out/ Tue, 23 Nov 2021 19:40:00 +0000 http://www.ruthewan.com/?p=2047

Installation and booklet, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2019

Asking Out recreated a Castleford primary school classroom from 1972. Inspired by the holdings of the National Arts Education Archive based at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, visitors were introduced to the pioneering teaching method ‘Asking Out’, a technique – developed by untrained teacher Muriel Pyrah, which invited children to speak out, ask questions and directly engage with each other.

The experimental methodology, which drew national media interest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, encouraged self-directed learning, fed into future teacher training under the leadership of Alec Clegg, and is still relevant today in what we might now call peer-to-peer learning. Developed from research carried out with Pyrah’s former pupils and colleagues, Asking Out explored the teacher’s unconventional methods and continues Ewan’s investigation into alternative education models and overlooked histories. 

Reconstructed as faithfully as possible, the classroom walls showcased children’s paintings, drawings and embroidery drawn from the NAEA collection. Activating the artwork and bringing the space to life, Ewan invited people to contribute to the space and to participate in creative activities echoing those taught by Pyrah, including studying nature through creativity. The classroom is a space for people to think about education, its impact upon social mobility, and how this can be mobilised today at a time when creative forms of learning have been marginalised from the curriculum. The classroom installation was presented alongside archival material including video footage and research including interviews with Pyrah’s former pupils and a text by educational historian Dr Lottie Hoare. 

What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our country must be strong
It's always right and never wrong
Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school

From ‘What did you learn in school today?’ Tom Paxton, featured in the section Young People and Education, from A Jukebox of People Trying the Change the World.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Paolo Fiere

I never let schooling get in the way of my education. 

Mark Twain (as quoted repeatedly in Pyrah’s own notes)

Asking Out, 2019
Installation and booklet, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

]]> There’s a Better Life and You Think About It Don’t You? https://www.ruthewan.com/theres-a-better-life-and-you-think-about-it-dont-you/ Tue, 23 Nov 2021 14:51:38 +0000 http://www.ruthewan.com/?p=2104

Live event, 2019

Featuring Tayo Aluko, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva, hosted by Morgan Bassichis

There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? was an evening of political song featuring vocal and choral performances to coincide with Ruth Ewan’s High Line commission Silent Agitator. Installed on the High Line at 24th Street, Ewan’s commission was a giant clock based on an illustration originally produced for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labour union by the North American writer and labour activist Ralph Chaplin that reads “What time is it? Time to organize!”

Chaplin composed many of the galvanising songs for the labor movement of the early 20th century, including the famous “Solidarity Forever” for the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek coal miner strike of 1912 in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Celebration and song have always played key roles in the efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, which has come to be known as the “singing union.”

Building on this history, the performers in There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? use music to relieve the fatigue of organising and celebrate labor rights victories, activists, and historical movements. For this event, Tayo Aluko performed excerpts from his one-person show, Call Mr. Robeson, about the life and times of the singer and activist Paul Robeson; the Sing in Solidarity Chorus sung a selection of their original choral arrangements for lyrics from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook; Lynn Marie Smith brought her energetic covers of pop songs recast with labor organising lyrics; NYC Labor Chorus performed selections from their repertoire developed over the last 28 years of singing together; and Brooklyn Women’s Chorus sung works including “We Were There” that speak to the central role of women in labor organising. Morgan Bassichis hosted the evening. Additionally, there was silk-screening of IWW graphics available on-site, provided by Shoestring Press.

Borrowing its title from Dolly Parton’s hit “9 to 5,” There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? recognises the uplifting significance of song in the workplace and in the exhausting job of labour organising. This evening of fun, lively performances invited musicians and organisers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play.

A short video of the event can be viewed here.

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