Tullie House Workshop: Mixed Media books inspired by Anselm Kiefer

Experimenting with different papers

I've been a bit behind on my blogging recently so over the past couple of weeks I have been catching up. I usually like to write up what I've been doing straight afterwards so that it is fresh in my mind but sometimes I just don't feel like it! Sometimes it's good to blog afterwards as it gives you a bit of time to think things over and reflect on things. I started blogging as I was doing so many different things and I wanted somewhere to record and share what I'd been up to and I find it really useful, it's also good to be able to look back through my posts and see all the different things I've done and how I felt about them at the time.

Tea and cutting and sticking. Happiness!

Some of our prepared papers

Anyway, on with the post! I did a workshop for Tullie House in November that I haven't written about yet. It was a bit odd as there was only one participant and not only that but the workshop was part of a much bigger project so the project co-ordinator was there too meaning two of us to one participant. Despite this it was actually a really good day, lots of exciting ideas came out of it and we experimented a lot. I'd worked with the project co-ordinator before on a community arts project a few years ago so it was good to catch up and work together again.

Seagulls...

...and envelopes were recurring themes

In February Tullie House have got a big Anselm Kiefer exhibition coming up in partnership with Artist Rooms. I' really excited about this exhibition as Kiefer's work and his approach to art making are really interesting and inspiring. It's especially exciting as I've been asked to get involved in several of the engagement projects running alongside the exhibition. This workshop was for a project working with disadvantaged young people and I was asked to give them a brief introduction to his work and then run a practical workshop. The idea was that this introductory workshop would help us gather a group of participants to work on a bigger piece in the New Year which could be shown with the Kiefer exhibition.

Experimenting with sculpture ideas

Experimenting with sculpture ideas

Throughout his career Kiefer has made books and he is famous for the range of unusual materials he uses in his work so I decided to do the workshop on mixed media book making. As we only had the one participant the workshop ended up being more of a creative experimentation day, we played around with different materials, talked through lots of different ideas and generally just had a good creative time. We focused on making different surfaces that we would then be able to work into and make into books. At the end of the session we had an interesting array of surfaces and papers to work on in future workshops and a whole load of ideas for larger pieces. We also made envelope books to use as little sketchbooks to keep with us and record our ideas. I really hope that more people can be recruited as this a project with a lot of potential.

Envelopes made of different papers ready to make a sketchbook