Three graces of practice: rendering the reciprocal interactions of artistry and teaching

Enacting reciprocity between art making and teaching practice constitutes a critical and ongoing challenge for artists who teach. While the difficulties inherent to enacting successful artist and teaching interaction are well documented, the challenge remains for researchers to identify specific strategies that can better assist art teachers to negotiate the complex relationship between artistry and teaching. This paper identifies and then extrapolates specific ways in which artist and teacher practices can enable teachers to realise more authentic, transferable and reciprocal exchanges between practices. To facilitate this, a hybridised methodology is adopted where methods integral to narrative inquiry and a/r/tography are drawn together to generate a flowing metanarrative of participants’ intricately layered stories, or ‘pictures’ of the enacted interplay between artistry and teaching. The insights reported upon in this paper allow for some of the existing beliefs and understandings around what constitutes a challenge and a benefit in the interaction of artistry and teaching to be contested. In exploring the storied experiences of three artists and teachers, this paper highlights concrete and discrete ways that artist and teaching practices can interact, and the specific implications this interaction can have for successful enactment of artist and teaching practices.