Our gifted and talented art students took part in a workshop day and exhibition at The Stanley Picker Gallery. The students created it in response to our artist in residence Lydia Moraitis.
Lydia, who uses collage and screen printing as her main mediums creates from her own experiences; writing poetry, she then creates screen-printed sculptures with found imagery that relates to the lines in the poem.
We asked the students to do the same but in response to a poem by David Whyte entitled ‘Working Together’ and encouraged the students to find imagery in response.
They took photographs of items that meant something to them, whether that was an object that brought nostalgia, their favourite instrument, photos of family members with special memories attached or even their favourite flower. They looked for the ‘shape of their true self’ in what they have around them.
During an all-day workshop within the gallery space they then painted and printed from their images.
In our workshop, we listened to a staff member of Stanley Picker talk about the inner workings of a gallery and what it’s like behind the scenes.
We then spent the day trying different techniques from painting, to Lino, to etching, and screen printing.
Looking at Lydia’s piece ‘Thorn in my side’ and her use of halftone dots the students painted their pictures onto dots themselves trying to emulate the pattern. The screen prints we created are also a joint work between Lydia and the students, Lydia collaged a selection of the students’ images together and created the screen print in the style of her own work which the students
then screen printed themselves!
Finally, we discussed what it means to curate a space and how to put work together in an interesting way, what it means to create conversations between different works and the logistics of a space, which resulted in the wonderful exhibition currently on show at The Stanley Picker Gallery.
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