Not having gained consent to photograph the students during my pilot study at the school, I was limited to working with the empty Art classroom; this created a sense of eeriness. I had the “death” of Art education on my mind – and Atkinson’s (2007) theory on the ‘failure to mourn’ an outdated Art education – and so it was fitting that the scene should be devoid of students, evoking the image of an abandoned Art education; or perhaps investigatory shots of a murder scene. The scattered worksheets, carelessly left on the tables, echo this mood.

In my field-notes I recorded that I felt self-conscious about taking the photos given that doing so might have been deemed “odd” behaviour. This came with a visceral fear of being seen and told off by a senior teacher, a fear probably shared by many students and simply because I was doing something unusual; my experiences of schooling conditioning this into me. Engaging in this act of art-making made me more aware of this, unearthing this. Having not used the camera for a number of years, that also felt clunky and unfamiliar. I decided to play with the camera to experiment with taking multiple exposures, exploring how to make the photographs themselves more “odd”.

The resulting greyscale photographs have a retro look, an aesthetic of grey, ghostly, shifting doubles which aptly evokes a sense of being out of time, reflecting the issue of school Art being static and anachronistic. The double exposure also creates a shift within the image which makes visible the embodied movement between exposures during the photo-making process. This could be symbolic of the movement, shift, evolution which this project seeks to cultivate in school Art education.