Aesthetic Enquiry and the Turner Prize

Throughout 2023 and 2024, Thoughtful worked with Towner Eastbourne to explore the value of Aesthetic Enquiry in their work, as the gallery prepared to host the 2023 Turner Prize – one of the world’s leading awards for contemporary art.

Working closely with the gallery’s curatorial, education and outreach staff, Thoughtful trainers Dr Sara Liptai and Dr Grace Lockrobin introduced the Towner to Aesthetic Enquiry as a means of enriching audiences’ experience of art by drawing them into conversations about the philosophical questions raised by contemporary artworks.

With funding from Arts Council England, we then devised a programme of professional development for local art teachers, aimed at widening access to the Turner Prize exhibition and equipping educators with the skills to facilitate philosophical discussions about art in art spaces, and back in the classroom.

Fifteen art teachers from ten schools across Eastbourne took part in the training which was hosted in the gallery space, alongside four freelance artists, two gallery professionals, and an academic from the University of Sussex. Together, we explored questions raised by the work of Turner Prize nominees Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker as well as other artists exhibited at the gallery at that time, including Maria Amidu and Emma Stibbon.

For more information about this project, read Sara’s blog about the project.