Studio 3D 03: Black Mountain

Studio brief

Following in the footsteps of John Andrew Rice's legendary Black Mountain College, famous for the school’s notable faculty and students alike and influencing countless future generations of artists, creative minds and educators. Our studio practice will be centred upon its belief that making art is vital to education, because it teaches observation, judgement and action – skills that can be applied to any walk of life.

Studio Black Mountain encourages the idea that art as social practice gives us a greater understanding of the world. We believe in the importance of building a sense of community. We will earnestly learn, work and play together – life and education entwined. Our environment will be of collaboration between our individual specialisms, other studios and real-life clients – working independently and together at the same time – creating a melting pot of ideas.

With artistic collaboration and freedom at our centre, we as a studio will favour the following rules:

• consider everything an experiment – nothing is a mistake, there is no win or fail, there is only make;
• the only rule is work – if you work it will lead you to something;
• pull everything out of your teacher;
• pull everything out of your fellow students;
• teacher – pull everything out of your students;
• be self-disciplined – to be disciplined is to follow in a good way, to be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way;
• everything is to be celebrated – be happy when you can manage it, enjoy yourself, it's lighter than you think;
• break all the rules, even our own rules.

In the words of Josef Albers:

"We do not always create works of art but rather experiments. It’s not our intention to fill museums, we are gathering experience".