Anselm Kiefer Artist Rooms Exhibition: Engage Workshop

Cutting and Sticking=Happiness!

The Anselm Kiefer exhibition has finished at Tullie House after a four month run. I've been involved in quite a few of the engagement projects around this exhibition and feel like it's just about all I've blogged about for a while! As well as being an excellent exhibition I've really enjoyed the engagement work, working with different groups on a range of activities form organising family friendly activities to working on an audio visual installation with students from James Rennie School and Beaumont College. My last activity was a short talk and workshop with Engage, which is the National Association for Gallery Education. This was a really nice way to finish up the project as the group were very interesting and interested!

We all love cutting and sticking

Making envelopes

Making folded Square books

I began by giving a talk about the Skyground project and then I ran a shortened version of the Mixed Media Sketchbooks session that I ran for Secondary school students as part of the engagement programme for this exhibition. I enjoy running this workshop as it is very accessible, the basic processes are so simple that even people a bit unsure about doing creative things are happy to get stuck in but it can also be expanded to create really interesting artworks. We focused on two main activities, envelope sketchbooks and folded square sketchbooks.

Joining together the envelopes

How to fold the squares

More envelopes

Most of the workshop was spent chatting with the participants, talking about how to adapt the activities for different audiences and projects. For example, the envelope sketchbooks are good for trips as they can be made of papers collected on the trip and can also be used to store small mementoes, such as tickets. I was a little bit stressed at the start of the session as Mark Newport (sound and digital artist) and I were putting up the Skyground installation (or rather the weather was preventing us) but it actually ended up being a good session with lots of ideas exchanged and a positive, productive atmosphere. By the end of the session everyone had a sketchbook to take home and, hopefully, had had a good time.