You will be able to book tickets from 9:30am on Monday 30th January.
Book here.
Lecturer: Stephen Bird
Location: NAS Building 5 (2nd Year Ceramics Studio)
During this 4 day workshop students will discover clay’s potential for direct expression. Creating slabs of clay to manipulate and draw on, using your hands, improvised tools, liquid clay and metal oxides, there is the possibility for something unexpected to arise. Through gesture, mark making and metaphor a new language arises where image and process are inexorably linked together.
Clay and drawing have been interchangeable since humans began to draw on cave walls and in rock shelter galleries some 60,000 years ago. Clay has been the carrier of pigments that have conveyed expression, ideas and symbols from the time of the arrival of Indigenous First Nation Peoples to Australia, and from European Palaeolithic times to the present day.
Clay is an incredibly responsive material. It has a unique ability to respond to the touch of our hands. Tools are often not necessary in manipulating it into objects. When we work with clay it responds directly and intimately and sometimes suggests what the next move might be. It can speak of movement and stillness and the passage of time.
This program will allow students to explore the materiality of clay and what it means to draw directly with clay and on clay.
Artists: Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher, Andy Goldsworthy, Lucio Fontana, Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Asger Jorn, Alexandra Engelfriet, Miquel Barceló
Students need to bring:
- Sketch pads
- Large sheets of paper
- A variety of brushes, both large and small
- Drawing ink
- Empty containers and buckets for water and mixing in
- Towel, sponge or kitchen roll
- Unusual things to draw with like sticks and other natural objects
DAYS ONE AND TWO:
Drawing with clay in various states – wet, plastic and dry
Exercises on paper and then slabs of clay
DAYS THREE AND FOUR:
Developing ideas and intuitive thought through divergent thinking drawing exercises
Formulating inks and making crayons to draw on ceramic surfaces
Selection of other works fired in electric kiln over weekend
Lecturer: Stephen Bird
Stephen Bird’s interests include comic books, English figure and slipware traditions as well as paintings and folk artefacts culled from his extensive travels through Europe, India, Asia and Australia. His use of words, collage and found objects as part of the final work, results in powerful multi-dimensional imagery which reflect on the global, transcultural nature of myths and ceramic archetypes.
