Síocháin Hughes is a multifaceted artist, designer and educator, with strong leadership skills garnered through 20 years of experience as a college-level educator and 14 years as a practicing designer. On faculty at Passaic County Community College, Discovery Charter School and the Great Oaks Charter High School Enrichment Program, she teaches students of all ages, from K-12 through college and graduate level. Subject areas include combined/multi media, art, design, drawing, painting, digital art and technology, photography, sculpture, ceramic arts, art appreciation, and art history. She maintains her fine art and graphic design studios in New Jersey.
As an arts educator, I help students establish their own ways to locate inspiration sources and develop their unique creative vision and voice. I make every effort to nurture each individual student’s artistic aspiration, to encourage openness and ongoing awareness of ambient art and ideas, and to promote the development of supportive community involvement. In my approach to these ideals, my primary building block is a strong emphasis on student-centered motivation and idea development. My expectation is that students will become comfortable with “not knowing,” while they develop an understanding of the significance of process over product in the practice of creative thinking as a lifelong endeavor.
The phrase “rules are made to be broken” is often applied to art, however, which rules are being broken? It isn’t always so obvious. Through their work, many artists engage a dialogue with the notions of a preceding generation of art and artists, and this dialogue may be obscured for the viewer by popular ideas about art. A thematic focus of my teaching has been to engage students in the process of nurturing and evolving a critical dialog through personal inquiry in relationship to their art. In an effort to stimulate this, I have created an assignment called Challenging the Authority of…. In working with this, while a student may consider traditional authorities of police or security in their work, the pedagogical goal of the assignment is to engage the student in a private quest for what is important to them. As a concept, this quest reaches into every project in my class as students delve into the questions at the heart of an artwork, those of an established artist, their classmates’, or their own. What stimulates the development of art and motivates the need to create? There is no right answer, but the goal of my teaching is to help the student realize their own “right” approach.
Student portfolio websites completed in Foundations in Digital Art: