This article offers an exploration of the art room as part of a broader project to consider the ways in which normative practices in art and design education can include and exclude students. The art classroom is explored here as a "disrupted space" and one that can promote movement between the structures and boundaries that affect our ways of being in, and experiencing, the world. The art room offers a space for colonising otherness, as well as an "alternative" or risky physical space, a refuge, or one with the potential to disrupt the dominant educational landscape.