How to Swim on Dry Land questioned the practices and contexts of learning, from the abstraction of classroom learning to the habits and tacit knowledge acquired through worldly experience.
In the autumn term of 2016, Art School invited Sarah Browne and the students and teachers of Killinarden Community School to work together. Through a series of workshops, Browne showed her student collaborators photographs from around 100 years ago, working from that to create “How to Swim on Dry Land”. The title is a response to one of the photos, which shows young boys trying to learn to swim without being in the water – how do you learn something when it is very materially abstract to you?
In response to this question of the material context of learning, the group developed a pantoum from a list of 10 things they would like to learn or unlearn which they then developed into a poster. Four of the themes were then selected by the group to explore through the production of a video, exhibited as part of It’s Very New School in Rua Red in 2017.