I am writing the posts for session 3-6 retrospectively.  This project has been a very interesting learning experience for me.  For the first couple of sessions I prepared a huge amount of research images, making elaboration presentations to the class.  Part of this was excitement using the new software and part of it was that I was a little worried about the length of each workshop – 3 hours.

As the project developed we experienced some complications with audio and video delay.  This made conversation very difficult, so I pulled back a little on the long chats at the beginning of the class and aimed to keep the work more practically.  Interestingly, as a consequence I felt the class started to engage more with the project.

In order to facilitate focusing on physically making work it was necessary for me to tune out of the session more and leave Damian, Ruth and the class get on with the work.  This felt a little strange for me at first but I think the resulting work speaks for itself.

Out of the work from the first few sessions I became very interested in looking further at ‘Interconnectedness” and wondered how this idea was reflected in my own practice. I could see this theme underlining my sculptures and drawings and wanted us as a group to start making sculptures based on this theme.

I collected some imagery that demonstrated to me the theme.

And we started making some work using wooden kebab sticks and plastercine.  I was thinking of abstract forms, so I had expected them to just play with the materials and see the results.

The work they made however was mostly representational – based on public sculptures they had seen in Belfast or other structures from there daily environment.  This point woke me up a little to the differences in our opinions on what art can be!