Fredric Gunve
About Fredric Gunve
ABOUT:My main areas of interest are materials, tools and techniques for creating and understanding visual-art, comic-art, conceptual-art and drawing as and in art-based teaching and art-based research. I have a lot of experience in teaching art and developing courses in higher art education and have taken part in several exhibitions, DIY publications and self-published comics, presented at academic conferences, written articles, book chapters and more.If asked for a one-liner defining my practice, I (Re)search for a cure against despair.
METHODS: I teach and do research by practicing how I teach and do research. Graphic noveling, Show and tell, Be the example, and Don’t kill your darlings are some of my art-based methods in teaching and research. I often use my own art and comics as methods and examples in my teaching and research. This means that my teaching, art making, research and artistic development projects merge and are in some ways inseparable from each other. My methods are experimental, practice driven and performative.
ART-BASED TEACHING:My teaching focuses on practicing and developing skills and knowledge in and about visual art, comic-art, drawing, visual storytelling, and conceptual-art. For me, teaching and learning is a relationship aiming to develop and transform the participants, teacher included. Teaching and learning take place all the time, in everyday life and in society at large. By combining artistic, educational, and everyday life situations, examples of transformative art and education can take form as inseparable expressions and actions. By approaching teaching from the perspective of a virus that bastardize the borders and definitions between visual-art, education and everyday-life, examples of performative, experimental, processed based and ephemerous educational-art situations can manifest and take shape.
Working as a teacher in higher education often means conveying and developing (new) knowledge. Art-based methods for teaching can help to shape, visualize, and experimental materialize your education, which can then help students reach their set goals. Art-based teaching animates and bring knowledge to life.
ONGOING ART-BASED RESEARCH and OTHER THINGS
- IT HAPPENS IN THE EVERYDAY. Making comics and graphic novel(ing) focusing on strengthening communities feelings of security and well-being in neighborhoods. An artistic research project in collaboration with the Housing Company Bostadsbolaget and the Tenants' Association Hyresgästföreningen.After some violent crimes in my neighborhood, I started drawing a comic that I published on the local Facebook page and in the lobby of the building I live in. It was a way to strengthen the community among us neighbors, and as a response to the media’s portrayal of the neighborhood. It was also the starting point to the artistic research project LEAVE NO LINE BEHIND, a comic-art-research-based (CBR) project.The creation of comic-art and graphic noveling can be a way to reclaim power over one's own narrative, the neighborhood and the life that takes place there. It is a way for people whose everyday lives are lived in the neighborhood to come together as a community, focusing on feelings of safety, and well-being. By creating and communicating your own story, the neighborhood history and present now a just and sustainable future is made possible. Through drawing and graphic noveling a connection to and grounding in the local area is created, which can lead to a greater sense of involvement in one's own neighborhood and perhaps even in society at large.
- LEAVE NO LINE BEHIND a comic-art-research-based (CBR) project focusing on graphic novel(ing) to empower neighborhoods. My neighborhood has experienced violence and other forms of crime lately. Last summer a man got shot on the street outside my building, and in March two bombs exploded. In response to the violence, I made a comic and self-published it in the lobby in my building. It was a way to create a community-based comic art story in response to how my neighborhood suddenly was portraited in the news as a bad and dangerous area. The need for new stories and narratives based in local communities is urgent in today’s turbulent political, economic, and environmental climate. On a local level it is to tell stories about a place that can become its own myths and thereby empower the place and its people. The making of visual stories, graphic novels and comic-art can be a way to take back the power of the narrative of a neighborhood and everyday life and thereby be part of creating new and just futures for communities. This project aims to find ways to deal with and help harbor trauma on a community level through comic-based art. By showing and telling stories from a neighborhood’s history and the present, a future can be visualized and created by and for the community. This visualization of a place through visual storytelling can open for the community to collectively harbor the experiences that make a neighborhood. The comic-art based project Leave no line behind artistically explores the power of visual storytelling and graphic novel(ing) to animate and create new myths by the making of a graphic novel from the local community and interpersonal meetings in the everyday. An important aspect of the project and the graphic novel(ing) is my own personal relationship to the stories being created. I am both a victim of the crimes, a neighbor in need and power, and an artist and academic looking at the stories from within.
- EVERYDAY COMIC-ART NETWORK A network for artists, academics, scholars and other interested in comic-art, graphic novels and visual storytelling in relationship to everyday life.(In this presentation the word comic-art includes graphic novels and visual storytelling if not specifically stated not to.)The networks main focus is on understanding and being part of social change through creating, reading and analyzing comics set in everyday life.The network gathers people interested in creating, reading, analyzing and developing the art form comics as a way of understanding and creating everyday life as an active part of social change. Everyday life is here used in a broad sense and is to be understood as a starting or focus point to take inspiration from. The comic-art created, read and analyzed can be historical, documentary and contemporary telling stories of what has been, the present now, or directed into the future aiming for change from stories about everyday life in future scenarios. Important for the network is the focus on creating, reading and analyzing comics as ways of understanding everyday life and the power for social change through comic-art. The network works from the belief that comic-art has the power to be an active part of social change. Here the creating perspective of comics is of importance. Comic-art focusing on everyday life as part of creating social change is the core of the network. EVERYDAY COMIC-ART NETWORK is a place for artists, academics, scholars and others to meet, exchange experiences and develop the field of comic-art focusing on social change. All participants are free to join and take part as artists, academics, scholars and more. Definitions are to be seen and used as fluid identities that can be changed and transformed depending on the specific situation, interest and more.
- #DENSESTORYTELLING is a visual and comic-art based storytelling style, and method under development. This storytelling is achieved through depth and immediateness and can be compared to a snapshot. It visualizes the complexity of the world and resembles more an explosion than a river in how it uses storytelling as a method for communication. The explosion creates a denseness in all its complexity and paradoxes. Dense storytelling is a way to tell something kaleidoscopic through visual means. It forces the viewer (reader) to follow many non-linear threads of stories simultaneously. Dense storytelling is a way to visualize instantaneousness.
OLDER PROJECTS OF RELEVANCE:
- REGN (RAIN) is a climate change art-based research project which imagines life as if rain were never-ending. The project was initiated in 2010 by Dr. Kajsa G. Eriksson and Fredric Gunve. The methods of REGN (RAIN) are experimental and emerge from Dr. Kajsa G. Eriksson’s art-based dissertation. The project is relational in nature and integrates visual art, sequential storytelling, performance, writing, and object-making with the entanglement of the real and imaginative rain-world. The method draws together the real and the speculative to make and mark the instability of both. Blurring the borders between fiction and reality fosters the emergence of unexpected experiences and connectivity. Instability, both imaginative and felt, and the emergence of experiences, affects, and empathy is key to the transformative power of the method. REGN (RAIN) has been presented at various conferences and exhibitions and used in education.The story of REGN (RAIN) can be downloaded both in Swedish and English at It never stops raining!
COURSES:
I have a lot of experience in teaching art and developing higher education courses. Most of my courses, workshops and lectures focus on visual-art, comic-art, conceptual-art, art-education and how to use art-based methods in teaching.
Since 2012 I run the course Atelierista (BVKBPA and BVKBPB). A course focusing on how art can be used in the educational philosophy Reggio Emilia. By connecting art practices, educational research, and art-based research and specific Nordic conditions, a unique course has taken shape.
Since 2015 I have run the visual-art based course LGBF51. A course focusing on how to teach art through material-based practices, mainly painting and drawing. The course also focuses on making your own teaching material, and how to communicate this material.
I am also in charge of a longer workshop focusing on comic-art and visual storytelling. The workshop introduces knowledge about comic-art, how to draw and make comics and how to use comics in teaching. An important part of the workshop is its focus on alternative and independent comic-art.
In 2012, I initiated and taught the course What are you doing? Contemporary art as educational action. The course was placed in the intersection between art and teaching. In the course we practiced, experimented, and reflected on how artists and teachers use performative and performance-based processes and methods. The course set out to connect and blur the borders between art, pedagogy, everyday life, and the process of becoming in teaching and art. Embedded in the course was a Shadow course. This part was a serious play, and an art-based experiment placed inside the institutionalized art-education. The Shadow Course was a way to practice informal course activities within the formal course with the aim of transdisciplinary outcomes. The Shadow course worked with the intention of making real change possible within institutions through the action of being a memetic virus. This is of importance especially today when ethical and sustainable ways of living and understanding the world are desperately needed for adapting to new environments and climates of the future. By taking part in the Shadow course, the participants could act from an in-ground position (an institutionalized underground) within the frameworks of formal education and institutional art and art education.
ETHICS:To work as a teacher comes with great responsibility. You hold a power that must be handled with care. Respect the students as individuals, they come with important experiences that will bring new knowledge to your teaching.
SALUTE:I want to SALUTE all the students I have met. Thank you for letting me be part of your education. You have taught me a lot, and without you none of the above written statements would have been possible. This is a rite of passages that creates the future.