Summer school

CQ's summer school weekend was held at Harper Adams (agricultural) College in Newport, Shropshire. Getting there wasn't half the fun - being there was very fun, though. "Something from nothing" was tutored by Bobby Britnell, whose work I have long admired. (The workshops run by Ruth Issett and Janet Edmonds looked good, too!)

To start with, Bobby told us to join two pieces of paper in as many ways as possible. Then we changed scale and developed one of those. The four pieces of paper slotted into a square was my starting point - the smaller ones are the square cut in half at an angle, slotted at various distances from the ends, and sometimes with the corners curled.The next day we treated papers in various ways -top left: resist (wax crayon) under ink on grey tissue; top right, Quink on a dry brush, lightly pulled across at an angle; bottom left, fax paper crumpled and gently ironed; bottom right, graphite on heavy paper, rubbed with linseed oil.

Then Bobby had the whole class do a drawing exercise, starting by putting a square onto paper with charcoal, then adding another square, and taking a circle out of the middle, and adding ... and taking out... Some people loved doing this, and some hated it - but don't the finished drawings look good! -The next stage was to use our own papers to make one of our structures. I think we suspected that eventually we'd be drawing these -- sure enough, here they all are, on the back wall:
I used heavy watercolour paper, putting the "box" near one end of the strips -- and it fell into a bird shape. Folding strips of the flimsier papers, and curling the corners, made a different sort of bird shape. I was inspired to use the qualities of the papers by reading, in one of the many books Bobby brought along for us to take to our rooms for bedtime reading, about how David Nash exploited the particular qualities of the different types of trees he uses for his sculpture.

Bobby suggested we photograph our structures in a different environment. The sun was shining, so I took my birds out into the air (it was quite windy) and tried to get them to hold still. For the grand finale of the weekend, each group set up a display of work and we wandered from room to room to see it all.
What will I carry forward from this workshop? More charcoal drawing, certainly. More thinking about the qualities of papers and types of cloth, and about using cloth-as-cloth. And it would be fun to make some of those "owls" in heavy plastic and wire them to the branches of the hedge ... and see if any passers-by notice ...