Fredric Gunve
About Fredric Gunve
SUMMARY:
Visual-art, comic-art, conceptual art, drawing, art-based teaching, and art-based methods for teaching are my main areas of interest. I have years of experience in teaching art and developing courses in higher art education. I have taken part in several exhibitions, DIY publications and self-published comics, taken part in conferences, written articles, book chapters and more.
I teach how to teach art.
METHODS:
Show and tell, Be the example, and Don’t kill your darlings are some of my art-based methods for teaching.I often use my own art and comics as teaching materials in my teaching. Through my practice I exemplify how art-based methods can be used in educational situations. This means that my teaching, art making, research and artistic development projects merge and are in some ways inseparable from each other. The methods are in that perspective performative.
I teach by practicing what I teach.
TEACHING:
My teaching focusses on developing visual-art, visual storytelling, comic-art, and conceptual-art in connection to teaching. Teaching is for me the aim to understand, and develop all participants (teacher included), and the relationship to the environment we are working in and with. Teaching in this sense can take place in all situations and places, in everyday life and in society at large. Teaching is, in my use of it, not limited to only educational institutions such as schools and higher education but is also an ongoing practice used by most people in their everyday life.By combining artistic, educational, and everyday life situations, examples of transformative art and education can take form as inseparable expressions and actions. From these entangled forms new, and sometimes transdisciplinary, knowledge can then emerge.By approaching different forms of teaching from the perspective of acting like a virus that bastardize the borders and definitions between visual-art, education and everyday-life, examples of performative, coincidental, processed based and ephemerous educational-art situations can manifest and take shape. From these shapes a variety of individual ways to practice art-education can then manifest among the participants.Or to put it in one simple sentence;
How to teach through alternative comic-art.
FOCUS:
Questions concerning ethics, justice, everyday life, climate change, and how to change the contemporary culture to create other futures are often focus in my work.How to use the now to change the future? By mixing, merging and bastardize teaching and education with visual-art, performance, comic-art, everyday-life, the imaginary, nonsense, fantasy, science-fiction, Cli-fi, and climate-change, I explore new methods for creating a just future.
To teach is to change the future.
ONGOING:
Visual art lab 23-24
(Bildlabb 2023–2024) is a meeting place open for students, teachers, staff, and others interested in drawing and comic-art creation using material based techniques (non-digital). The lab focusses on developing and conveying knowledge and skills in drawing, comic-art and visual-storytelling through material based techniques and materials, and how to teach using these materials and techniques. In the lab, knowledge is approached through a community-based sharing of experiences and a DIY attitude to experiment with materials, techniques, and visual-storytelling as a craft and skill. An important focus for the Visual-art lab 23–24 are questions on social and environmental sustainability.We meet up weekly to draw together. Everyone is welcome to participate, just remember the meetings are practice based, so bring your pens and pencils, crayons, papers, or other tools for drawing.For more information contact Fredric.gunve@hdk.gu.se By drawing together we develop our skills and understanding of what drawing can do.
Art based teaching methods:
Working as a teacher in higher education often means to convey and develop (new) knowledge. Through art-based methods for teaching, exploration, and development of new skills can be given a greater space in your education. Art-based methods for teaching can help to shape, visualize, and materialize processes and attitudes in your education, which can then help students reach their set goals. The method is to work with teaching as an experience-creating process through material and visual based methods. It’s also an opportunity to create space for interdisciplinary meetings through your teaching. Art-based teaching animate and bring knowledge to life.
REGN (RAIN) is a climate change art project which imagines life as if rain were never-ending. The project was initiated in 2010 by Dr. Kajsa G. Eriksson and Fredric Gunve. The methods of REGN (RAIN) are experimental and emerge from Dr. Kajsa G. Eriksson’s art-based dissertation. The project is relational in nature and integrates visual art, sequential storytelling, performance, writing, and object-making with the entanglement of the real and imaginative rain-world.
The method draws together the real and the speculative to make and mark the instability of both. Blurring the borders between fiction and reality fosters the emergence of unexpected experiences and connectivity. Instability, both imaginative and felt, and the emergence of experiences, affects, and empathies are key to the transformative power of the method. REGN (RAIN) has been presented at various conferences, exhibitions and used in education. The story of REGN (RAIN) can be downloaded both in Swedish and English at http://regn-rain.se It never stops raining!
#densestorytelling is a visual and comic-art based storytelling style under development. This storytelling is achieved through depth and immediateness and can be compared to a snapshot. It visualizes the complexity of the world and resembles more an explosion than a river in how it uses storytelling as a method for communication. The explosion creates a denseness in all its complexity and paradoxes. Dense storytelling is a way to tell something kaleidoscopic through visual means. It forces the viewer (reader) to follow many non-linear threads of stories simultaneously. Dense storytelling is a way to visualize instantaneousness. Show and tell it all at once.
You can find more examples of dense storytelling under the hashtag #densestorytelling on Instagram. You can find more examples of my comic-art If on Instagram @fredricgunve
COURSES:
I have years of experience in teaching art and developing higher education courses. Most of my courses, workshops and lectures focus on visual-art, comic-art, conceptual-art, art-education and how to use art-based methods in teaching.
Since 2012 I run the course Atelierista (BVKBPA and BVKBPB). A course focusing on how art can be used in the educational philosophy and pedagogy Reggio Emilia. By connecting art practices, educational research, and art-based research and specific Nordic conditions, a unique course has taken shape.
Since 2015 I run the visual-art based course LGBF51. A course focusing on how to teach art through material-based practices, mainly painting and drawing. The course also focuses on making your own teaching material, and how to communicate this material.
I am also in charge of a longer workshop focusing on comic-art and visual storytelling. The workshop introduce knowledge about comic-art, how to draw and make comics and how to use comics in teaching.An important part of the workshop is its focus on alternative and independent comic-art.
In 2012, I initiated and taught the course What are you doing? Contemporary art as educational action. The course was placed in the intersection between art and teaching. In the course we practiced, experimented, and reflected on how artists and teachers use performative and performance-based processes and methods. The course set out to connect and blur the borders between art, pedagogy, everyday-life, and the process of becoming(?) in teaching and art.Embedded in the course was a Shadow course. This part was a serious play, and an art-based experiment placed inside the institutionalized art-education. The Shadow Course was a way to practice informal course activities within the formal course with the aim of transdisciplinary outcomes. The Shadow course worked with the intention of making real change possible within institutions through the action of being a memetic virus. This is of importance especially today when ethical and sustainable ways of living and understanding the world are desperately needed for adapting to new environments and climates of the future. By taking part in the Shadow course the participants could act from an in-ground position (an institutionalized underground) within the frameworks of formal education and institutional art and art education.
A shadow courses allow for the unexpected.
ETHICS:
To work as a teacher comes with great responsibility. You hold a power that must be handled with care. Respect the students as individuals, they come with important experiences that will bring new knowledge to your teaching.
If asked to formulate my work in one sentence my answer is I (Re)search for a cure against despair.
SALUTE:
I want to SALUTE all the students I have met. Thank you for letting me be part of your education. You have taught me much, and without you none of the above written statements would have been possible. This is a rite of passages that creates the future.
This is a SALUTE to all of us in transformation.