Proximity

You will be able to book tickets from 9:30am on Monday 30th January.
Book here.

Lecturers: Margaret Roberts and Emma Wise

Location: NAS Building 26-1 and NAS campus

In 2023 Proximity moves to the grounds of the NAS campus, after several years in Articulate in Leichhardt. It will continue to offer opportunities to develop sensitivity to your immediate environment and to working with low-tech materials and methods but in relation to a different site.  

Being an outdoor, public site, the NAS campus enables Proximity to introduce you to public art protocols of working in communal space. It will encourage you to work more lightly in that space than most public art does—to easily return the space to how you found it and give you the opportunity to show your regard for where we live and work. It will encourage you to use a process of putting two things together—one being a location as you find it, and the other being what you temporarily bring to it. It will encourage you to record your temporal engagements in a permanent record such as an artist’s book or other form of documentation that can be shown at a Drawing Week exhibition. As the workshop has a base in 26.1, there will also be opportunity to build and document a project in an indoor site over a few days, if you prefer that.  

The workshop will start with a slideshow of these and other artworks that engage lightly with their physical site in ways that easily leave the site as the artists found it. We will walk around the campus as a group to check out locations that spark your interest and suggest possible ways of engaging with them. Lecturers and interns will support you in developing your experiments in engaging with multiple locations over the 4 days. You will be shown examples of artist’s books and other ways to record your discoveries.  

Expect to come away from the workshop with: 

• an artist’s book recording your 4 days of actual or planned interventions in photos, collages, plans or other drawings; and 

• greater understanding about how you want your artwork to treat the physical world we live in. To support this reflection, we will talk briefly about Jane Bennett’s ideas about the ‘vibrant matter’ we live among.  

MATERIALS – WHAT TO BRING

• first day: bring basic drawing & recording materials: drawing notebook, pencil, eraser, camera, bag

• Optional: coloured paper/card, scissors, cutting knife, small cutting board, masking tape, permanent marker (to use over masking tape), Blu Tack, white/coloured string/thread/yarn, pins/tacks/nails, silver foil, fabric/rags, plastic, clay, chalk, brush (for sweeping ground etc), shoulder bag/bucket/plastic containers for storing/carrying materials outside, hat, gloves etc for outside protection.

• provided in 26.1: large cutting board, cardboard (also see skip), coloured paper samples, hammer, ruler, white chalk, broom/brush, floor/walls/roof/windows/chairs etc

MATERIALS – REMEMBER THE CAMPUS IS A COMMUNAL PLACE:

ESSENTIAL TO KEEP MATERIALS ETC IN CARRY-BAG/BUCKET & TAKE WITH YOU;

ALWAYS LEAVE COMMUNAL SPACES AS YOU FOUND THEM.

Sue Callanan Shifting Sands 2008 Darling Street Balmain

Lecturers:

Margaret Roberts teaches in the third year drawing program at NAS. Margaret has also taught in the Sculpture and Foundation programs at Sydney College of the Arts and in TAFE. 

Emma Wise is currently a Doctorate candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney, and teaches in the third year Drawing program at NAS.