Seminar V: Re:Making (Autumn 2015)
Seminar V is devised as primarily a set of two day events, under the theme of ‘Re:Making’ – a consideration of what it means to make and re-make ideas, objects and processes. The sessions provide key prompts or challenges for collaborative engagement, but without necessarily stipultaing required outcomes. Instead the sessions are intended as a open spaces to explore and experiment. Working together we can observe and draw upon the range of decisions we each seem to make intuitively as we approach the ‘research’ in hand. Re:Making is a response to Ian Dawson’s suggestion at a past seminar that we aim to work together, and intensively, to question what it is we do and think when making, writing and researching. As he puts it in his book Making Contemporary Sculpture (2012):
But what of the artists, the makers, how do they make decisions? Sculpture departments in art schools across the world maintain their foundries, ensuring that an essential principle is practically available, but now an artist is as likely to atomise or extrude or draw; print, wear or perform with objects as part of an adaptable practice. And since art has been transformed into aesthetic communication it is no longer traditions but messages that count, reflecting the information age.
[We might consider that artists] work unsystematically, that the processes they are involved in can be both simultaneously mindful and mindless, and that gestures that later might become iconic are sown from simple intuitive responses, and come from a stance of not knowing; that artists, irrespective of the scale of their work, endeavour to work from a position of unfamiliarity, the act of discovery still the bedrock of the making process. (Dawson, Making Contemporary Sculpture, 2012, p.9)
Programme
Saturday 17 October (11am – 1pm)
Drawing Together
Venue: Discovery Centre, Winchester
Through the medium of chalk and shadows Drawing Together brings people together in a shared act of drawing. Visitors to the Discovery Centre are invited to draw together as a means to draw ourselves together if only fleetingly, just as our shadows are mere fleeting images of ourselves. This act of drawing upon the ground of the city in which we live and work is intended to mark a temporary reflection of ourselves as individuals and as a community. (Organised by Cheng-Chu Weng and Sunil Manghani). Further Details…
Wednesday 28 & Thursday 29 October – 2 Day Seminar
Re:Making an Exhibition
A two-day seminar event in which we will work together to curate an exhibition for the Winchester School of Art Gallery, which will be available to the public throughout November. The exhibition will bring together artists’ book from an exhibition that was originally held in Delhi and at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2014. Working in collaboration with Blueprint 12, these shows were curated by Amit Jain, who will be joining us for this seminar. The original shows of ‘Reading Room’ featured works by fifteen artists from across the world. Many of these works are being shipped over for our own iteration of the show, to which we will be selecting key works from own Artists’ Books Collection, held at WSA. The seminar will be co-convened by August Davis, Linda Newington, Sunil Manghani and Amit Jain. The PV for the exhibition will be held on Friday 30 October.
Day 1: Wednesday 28 October, 10am – 3pm, WSA Gallery
Thursday 29 October, 10am – 5pm, WSA Gallery
Friday 30 October
Curator’s Talk & PV: Reading Room
Tuesday 10 & Wednesday 11 November – 2 Day Seminar
Re:Making – Plastic Surgery
Day 1: Tuesday 10 November, 11-5pm, PGR Room
Day 2: Wednesday 11 November, 10-4pm, PGR Room
+ WSA Seminar, 4-6pm: Ian Dawson: Taplow House (Harvard Suite, RM #3032)
Wednesday 9 & Thursday 10 December – 2 Day Seminar
Re:Making a Room
Day 1: Wednesday 9 December, 10am-4pm, PGR Room
Day 2: Thursday 10 December, 10am-4pm, PGR Room