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30 July 2014

"Contemporary crafts" course, day 1


You get some interestingly-marked tables in the art rooms at City Lit...!

The course runs all week and encompases four crafts - textiles, basketry, jewellery, ceramics. But first, an introductory day, setting the theme, showing some slides, and practising some mark-making.

The theme is "growth" - which has a wide range of interpretation, whether organic plant growth, urban growth, growing crystals, decay as the corollary of growth, etc etc.

Slides included some names new to me - Doug and Mike Starn's glass, Brian Nash Gill's woodcuts, Vera Neuman's textiles, Andrew Wicks' ceramics, Kelly Valetti's baskets, Stephen Johnson's baskets, Orlanda Broom's layered tropical landscapes, Arne Quinze's huge structures, Jennifer Mastre's baskets, Beatriz Milhazes, Michael Brennan Wood, Elana Herzog, Junko Mori...

Then it was out with the mixed media, resulting in a sheet full of marks -
Out came the viewfinders ("L-plates)
And next thing you knew, there were tasteful arrangements all over the walls
including the strips
The instructions for the strips were: choose two marks that were very different, put one at each end, and "do something" in the middle to join them together.
After some observational drawing from natural shapes, the day was suddenly at an end. We have a vocabulary of marks to take along with us -
my day's work
elsewhere in the room
a fab frame - resulting from the drawing of a knobbly, spiky twig
Under my cut-out mark sheet, the same marks as at the start of the day -


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