2025 Conference.
Feral Art School, Hull
Culture Co-operative:
Moments, Spaces and Alternatives for Art and Culture of Learning
Our 2025 conference looked at a culture of co-operation between mainstream and alternative art schools, and other partners, to consider what this looks like now and how it could be in the future. The themes followed on from our 2024 Conference: The Art of Resistance (UCA Canterbury) and the arguments of the recent book Cooperative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education (Hudson-Miles and Goodman eds 2024), in which educators from both mainstream and alternative art schools issued a variety of creative, political, and pedagogical challenges to the current neoliberal HE paradigm.
Presentations addressed the moments, spaces, and alternatives for art and cultures of learning. With the aim to question and speculate on whether a counterhegemonic alliance between mainstream and alternative art schools is possible.
Conference Presentations.
Feral Art School hosted the 2025 NAFAE conference in Hull, and set the context in which it has developed as an alternative art school since 2018. The School offers visual arts courses, post graduate-level and studio programmes. Partnerships within and beyond the cultural sector are key to supporting the work of the School. Kath Wynne-Hague, Head of Culture, Place & City Centre for Hull City Council, Dominic Gibbons, Managing Director of Wykeland Development Group and Max May, Chief Officer of HEY Creative, provided an overview of the work each organisation is doing to place culture and heritage at the heart of the development of the city and its communities. This is in line with Hull’s new Cultural and Heritage Strategy 2025-30, which emphasises a community-led culture, including sustainable cultural infrastructure, civic identity and placemaking, wellbeing and social impact, and especially strategic partnerships.
Take a look at an overview of the conference presentations below.
Cilla Ross
Keynote Presentation
In her keynote presentation ‘A ‘hidden’ alternative: co-operative pedagogy, arts practice & possibilities’, Cilla Ross discussed a hidden alternative in the power of co-operative pedagogy, arts practice and possibilities. There are 3 million co-operative in the world, all example of doing thing differently and organising things differently.
Sophie Mak-Schram
Un-becoming Institutions
Sophie Mak-Schram explored the complex concept of the “alternative art school,” questioning what it is alternative to, and how terms like “art” and “school” carry multiple meanings. Using Black Mountain College as a starting point, Sophie challenged its traditional framing as an alternative art school, arguing this label both granted curricular freedom and created an illusion of (institutional) stability. The presentation examined contemporary examples—Interflugs (Berlin), School of Love (Belgium), and School of Commons (Zurich)—each navigating different relationships with formal institutions while maintaining alternative educational approaches that deployed art in diverse ways. Sophie’s dual perspective within formal Fine Art education and alternative learning led to a propositional argument that counterhegemonic alliances between mainstream and alternative art schools might be sustained by embracing the political ambivalence of art and employing strategies that shelter radical pedagogies through as much as nearby institutional contexts.
Marsha Bradfield
What Would Barbara Do? Or Towards an Incidental Practice
Marsha Bradfield focused on artist-activist Barbara Steveni’s dual commitment to formal art education and a placement-based approach that “rewilded” creative practice beyond traditional sectors. It advanced a broader interpretation of “industry” as both a sector and a form of diligent, industrious practice, emphasising the concept of “incidentality” — the role of the “incidental person” alongside the artist in shaping collaborative networks. Drawing on the work of the Incidental Unit (IU), an intergenerational community co-founded by Steveni, Marsha explored how this legacy can inspire relational and practice-based research in contemporary contexts. This ongoing inquiry aims to deepen understanding of creative agency and honour Steveni’s impact since her passing in 2020.
Linda Aloysius,
Rewilding Higher Art Education: Towards Creative Resilience
Linda Aloysius explored how Higher Art Education can cultivate creative resilience by learning from non-human species, particularly in the context of climate change and the speaker’s dual experience as an artist and horticulture student. Building on reflections from the 2023 'Poor Things' exhibition at Fruitmarket, she asked how pedagogy might be reimagined to foster inter-species empathy and regenerate the “scorched earth” of art education eroded by capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on feminist and ecological theory (Eisenstein, Butler, Haraway), the paper critiqued the co-option of collaboration and sociality into systems driven by monetisation and cultural capital, arguing that this blend of capitalism, patriarchy, and education has produced a widespread disconnection - both inter-personal and inter-species - that undermines the ethical foundation of creative learning. Through lived experience and artistic practice, Linda highlighted hidden, intersectional inequalities within art education, and proposed that models of resilience found in nature can inspire new, decolonised, and empathetic pedagogies that resist the extractive logic of patriarchal capitalism and foster genuine relational rewilding in the arts.
Uwe Derkson
The Outlier
Uwe Derkson reflected on the evolving landscape of art education and looked at the position of The Margate School as a unique, postgraduate institution that resists easy categorisation as an “alternative art school.” Rather than emerging as a reaction to rising student fees or critiques of mainstream universities, The Margate School was founded from a deeper inquiry into the purpose, nature, and power dynamics of education itself. It adopts a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that considers the intersection of art, society, and nature. The school deliberately resists bureaucratic and managerial trends in higher education, instead valuing personal initiative, professional innovation, and a culture of entrepreneurship. As an educational “outlier,” The Margate School sees its difference not as a flaw but as an opportunity - offering new breakout points for learning, research, and practice that challenge dominant models and provide inspiration for reimagining the future of art education within and beyond institutional boundaries.
Jack Lewjaw
Understood the Assignment: Day School, an Alternative Art School
Jack Lewjaw’s presentation explored Day School, an alternative art school in Bristol where he serves as director. Created in response to the limitations of formal arts education, Day School offers a flexible, inclusive, and peer-led learning environment that values creativity outside institutional structures. Emphasising collective work, accessibility, and community, the model challenges traditional hierarchies and promotes arts education as both a social and political act. Jack shared insights from the past four years, highlighting contributions from participants and guest artists, and reflecting on lessons learned as Day School prepare to expand to new locations.
Paul Haywood
Mutually agreed resentment: a journey to MARS in the age of global ‘engagement’
Paul Hayward focused on Shared Campus, an international collaboration platform established by 13 arts institutions to foster intercultural education, research, and co-creation. Despite early success and a progressive five-year expansion plan launched in 2023 - focused on inclusivity, shared governance, and globally transferable qualifications- the UK partner institution strategically withdrew, citing risk and a shift toward its internal social mission. This decision disrupted the initiative’s governance, undermined the contributions of UK-based academics, and exposed tensions between institutional agendas and grassroots, post-colonial collaboration. In response, remaining members are envisioning a revitalised Shared Campus, one that rejects hierarchical managerial oversight and prioritises bottom-up, post-colonial approaches to global cooperation in the arts and higher education.
Paul Jones
Curiosity over Curriculum: Embracing a Precarious Pedagogy
What if art education was defined not by rigid structures, but by a fluid network of relationships that values curiosity over a fixed curriculum?
Drawing from the pedagogical principles of the Copenhagen Free University, the innovative ideas presented by Jeroen Lutters in his concept of No University, and Paul Jones own experiences in co-designing an open ended event called OUTTAKES within an institutional framework, this paper explored how alternative models of art education can challenge the slow creep of corporate doctrines, prioritise collectivity, and reclaim curiosity as a radical approach to teaching.
Daniel Hawley-Lingham,
Deterritorialising art education: counter-hegemonic networks and decentralised learning
Daniel Hawley-Lingham’s presentation looked at how alternative art education initiatives are responding to the corporatisation and rigidity of mainstream art schools by creating decentralised, cooperative, and artist-led learning environments. Drawing on case studies such as Hybrid Realities: Lab, Six Minutes Past Nine, School of the Damned, and New Art City, it explored how digital platforms and peer-led models enable new forms of creative pedagogy outside traditional institutions. Grounded in the concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ from Deleuze and Guattari, the paper considered how these experimental spaces challenge conventional ideas of where and how learning occurs. It reflected on whether hybrid models can influence institutional pedagogy while retaining autonomy and proposed decentralised accreditation as a possible, but complex, alternative to institutional validation.
Jenny Walden,
Is There Another Picture of the Artist in the Studio?
Jenny Walden’s presentation revisits and extends earlier critiques of individualised notions of artistic creativity and authorship, rooted in the post-Hornsey 1968 discourse and journals like BLOCK and the work of Art & Language. It draws on more recent ideas -particularly Neil Mulholland’s argument for a “paragogy” in Reimagining the Art School that challenge the traditional pedagogical model of art education. Mulholland suggests that rather than reinforcing individual self-pedagogy and distinct bodies of work, art schools could foster collective learning practices that resist individualisation. Walden seeks to provoke discussion on what teaching means in contemporary art education, especially amid its diminishing external validation, and how alternative models might reframe the role and value of the art school today.