Huge congratulations to Dr Amani S Taresh, for passing her PhD viva with no corrections!
Amani is an artist-educator, based between Kuwait and the UK, with a practice grounded in art and weaving traditions:
“My PhD research investigates how the integration of the traditional Al-Sadu weaving into cross-cultural art classroom contexts in Kuwait and the UK enables children to make meaning through embodied, collaborative practice, while foregrounding the artist-teacher as a critical and reflexive practitioner who challenges dominant hierarchies of art, labour, and cultural knowledge.
Over the course of my PhD, I have come to understand research as an embodied and material process, shaped through making, sensing, and responding to materials rather than through writing alone. Working closely with weaving, its rhythms, resistances, and physical demands, changed how I think about knowledge, learning, and cultural transmission, particularly through
the interactions between children, materials, and shared practice.
The viva exhibition feels both like a moment of arrival and a point of transition: it brings together years of embodied inquiry while also opening new questions about where the work might go next. Working with children across Kuwait and the UK has reconfigured my role as an artist-educator in ways I did not anticipate, reinforcing for me the value of collaborative, material-led processes in supporting agency and meaning-making.
Looking ahead, I want to continue developing the woven sculptures as an evolving body of work and to extend the Woven Dialogues methodology into wider educational and community contexts. In the longer term, I see my practice continuing to combine studio work, teaching, and research, using embodied art practices to create spaces for dialogue around identity, memory, and belonging.”
First Supervisor: Tina O’Connell, Associate Professor in Art
with Dr Suzy Tutchell, Associate Professor Institute of Education, University of Reading.
Examined by Dr Ciara Healy, Head of Fine Art & Education, Limerick School of Art and Design, with Tim Renshaw, University of Reading School of Art.
@q8artist77
q8artist77@gmail.com
LinkedIn: Amani Taresh
Reading School of Art 