Proximity

You will be able to book tickets from 9:30am on Wednesday 29th January.

Book here

Lecturers: Margaret Roberts and Emma Wise

Location: NAS Building 26-1 and NAS campus

Proximity offers opportunities to develop sensitivity to your immediate physical environment using the low-tech materials and methods of drawing.  

Being an outdoor, public site, the NAS campus enables Proximity to also 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 interact with the site in ways that enable you to easily return the site to how you found it. 

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 in some form of line, shape, objects or other form of drawing.  

You are asked to record your temporal engagements in a permanent record such as an artist’s book or other form 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 artworks that engage lightly with their physical site. We will walk around the campus as a group to check out locations that spark your interest and suggest possible ways to engage with them. Lecturers and interns will support you in developing your experiments in engaging with one or many 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;  

• confidence in making site specific artwork; and 

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

MATERIALS – WHAT TO BRING 

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

• On later days bring low-tech materials appropriate to your initial ideas for a work: eg coloured paper/card, scissors, cutting knife, small cutting board, masking tape, permanent marker (to use over masking tape), Blu Tack, plasticine, 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. 

• provided in 26.1: large cutting boards, cardboard, coloured paper samples, hammer, ruler, white chalk, broom/brush,  

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.