Workshop in Glasgow 19.04 2017
Karen Disen
Sketching from internal experiences.
This working session is about making three-dimensional sketches of the movements we make when we stand, take a step, or sit and lay down. Because we normally have automated these movements, we are not so aware of or conscious about them.
Nevertheless, these movements are crucial and characterizes us!
Program:
Giving attention to movements. Your own body as the source of information. So first we need to acclimatize and do some warming up to strengthen the concentration and registration within ourselves. During the day, we will work with repetition of your own movements and translate the movements, and body memos/reflections directly into sketches. It provides the opportunity to go into shorter sequences of the experience from movements - possibly enlarge, emphasize something and make sketches of the main impression and/or details.
1. Standing, weight - how the body supports you, feet, hips, shoulders.
Gravity; Turning Angles Balance.
Wire sketches.
2. The total body; sitting, standing up, laying down and contract, -be as small as possible.
The pressing against the chair, on the back, on the ass, - when laying down, muscles contracting give attention to gravity towards floor on different places. Complexity and large variations. Being dramatic.
Sketches in rough materials as total abstraction - enlarge and exaggerate to create the clearest experience from your own perspective of values.
Movements focused on interspace and the room.
3. Movements focused on interspace work in pairs, back to back, creating a dialogue emphasized on listening to each other.
Next move is to mirroring each other's movements first one then the other.
Further modulate each other (Very caring and listening to what the body is able to do) with attention on interspace.
Both active and passive participant. Focus on the differences of being active/being passive.
Sketches in plasticine, articulating physical the interspaces from some of these experiences of working together.
4. Moving from low (contraction) to high (expansion) in slow, slow, slow tempo (motion). It forms a whole rhythm sequence. The lines you create in the room from the whole sequence is what you bring through your body to the last sketches.
Drawing with stick and ink on smooth fast, thick, good quality paper.
Materials and requirements:
- wire, pliers, string, strips, residues from packaging, plasticine grey or white colored, ink, A3 paper - different qualities, scissors, knives, wooden sticks, tape - different qualities, glue gun …..
Document: take photos, phone, camera.
The participant students need to wear clothing easy to move in, tumble around and even laying down on the floor.
Summing up:
I hold the workshop with 11 Design students from the Illustration group at the third year level.
Because I had to talk to give insight in the reasoning and background that has led to the different exercises while I was demonstrating with movements and body language, I had to concentrate totally. The students were very fast within their processes trying themselves what knowledge they could find in their own moving bodies.
I went into reminding that being creative is demanding; inspiration, imagination and intuition. These three stages of mind are elusive and the only thing to do is carrying on the work and hope they will return. Practicing and exercising is the best way to improve and then continue to experiment so the open possibilities of solutions might arrive.
Registration:
Sensory knowledge is stored in the body and is self-regulating often even automatically. We know what to do and do not need to think about it.
Categories, terminology is knowledge that makes it even worse to linger by observations and sort out variations in qualities. Many times, it is necessary to make up a question of investigation to enter the threshold of categories and already stored knowledge.
I will try to explain with an example: To pour coke over ice cubes is a commercial everyone know; I am supposed to want to buy and drink coke. When I have set my mind to register qualities, I look at the different textures, the way light is sparkling and how colors brightly is twinkling. This way I concentrate of the esthetical playfulness in the film and are not going to drink anything except for water and just because I am thirsty.
Therefore, this way of observing and activate the brain is occupying the mind to sort and find similarities and differences. Recognition give the mind an opportunity to reveal. Then we have the possibility to start another process simultaneously and that is to collect details from the senses, finding the pulsating differences and make new knowledge about their qualities.
The students were asked to not divide in positive and negative, not any judgements. There are the qualities and wide range of details we try to collect from the work. It is crucial to think about this in advanced because they all will be carried out of their comfort zone during the workshop.
Practical activities:
To have many thing available to make sketches of different kinds increase the intensity in the work. I emphasize physical presence and undefined sketching materials in action and making.
I tried to bring Friedrich Schillers* thoughts about aesthetical awareness into the work. Passive embracing and active reshaping modes changed while we carried out the sketches. To be creative and cognitive, emotional and intellectual in our aesthetical play.
Formal drive Play drive Sensuous drive
Presentations:
When we were presenting I gave them three possibilities to talk from
1 What happened to be the reason to establish such expression?
2. How did the material available and the choices in composition challenge and bring a dialog into the expression?
3. In which way is the processes of moving and making sketches developing a new story or statement, something appearing?
The students did both one and two; no one came with something pointing forwards. I even said that a god or bad lie could do, but they did not respond to that challenge. Afterwards I believe this has to do with our moral responsibility about what is the truth. Even art and design students are hesitating to make up a story. Still this is something I like to work with. Especially because ide development from a practical activity of course has to take on a story afterwards and that is not cheating. In our inhabited lives, we are used to do it the other way round, start with a story then mage the visual images.
End notes:
To carry out ideas from the stored information in the body (the head is just a part of the body) as a whole into materialized sketches provide another method of tactile or approach to, practical just trying something while holding on, and then let things grow. There might be some noise from the thoughts, but this is to be ignored with an optimistic “I never know what will happen next” attitude. Our habits of doing things is often blocking new venues to arrive or be established. I have emphasized through the workshop that there are numerable ways of doing things and in creative processes; one might benefit a lot by always having in mind a question taking care of the unknown.
*References: Shiller institute. Fidelio Volume 14, number 1-2, Spring-Summer 2005
A readers Guide to Letters on the Aesthetical by William F. Wertz, Jr.
