There’s nothing like an attractive template to motivate action,
clarify purpose and set deadlines.
Workshops can be held at University of Technology Sydney, Boomalli, Eora TAFE and elsewhere. Poster art can be adapted to suit context.
What workshop ideas do you have?
What other venues?
What costs would be involved?
Claire and I have ideas for projecting scientific data of relationships between diverse life forms (in corals, sea grass, rivers etc), for people to trace as a collective art work, in conversation with a scientist who can share the story revealed by the data. Workshop
participants would be invited to share their stories of relationship to that story… and so ideas for further workshops will grow… like turning that first idea on its head and starting by drawing creatures and their relationships to each other and to lands and waterways.
We can promote workshop entry by donation or formal fee.
After talking yesterday with Gwanji Monks and his students at Eora TAFE, and yarning with Cat on the phone, I Emailed the Director and the Head of Studies at the National Art School in Paddington. Writing this Email helped sort out the ideas that had emerged from our conversations.
‘I’m writing about a project that may interest you to be a part of, if you think this would fit within your NAS program next year, and if you have capacity to support your part in it.
The purpose of the project is to expand Western models of art-making through Indigenous relational practice. This means the focus is on making meaning through the art-making process, respecting that meaning evolves as understanding grows, and that understanding grows through relationships with country, people, and materials available.
Your participation would involve hosting workshops for your students, in animating stories of relationship to country. ‘Animating Stories’ workshops would be led by project co-creators in association with participating NAS lecturers.
The project is ‘Seeding Treaties: Voices from the Southern Ocean’ that gives voice through diverse languages of the arts, to creatures of the ocean and their relatives on land:
http://www.antarcticanimation.com/content/wordpress/
My colleague Cat Kutay and I would like to meet and talk with you
in person about possibilities.
I copy Gwanji Monks into this message as it was he who suggested we contact you. Gwanji is an Aboriginal artist and teacher at Eora TAFE, and he may want to be part of our conversation to further his interest in connecting art training institutions.
Please let us know if it interests you to meet, and what times you are available.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Lisa and Cat
(and Gwanji)