Fenfolio: poetry

Wednesday, 20 December 2017

Artistic Explorations: Visual Poetry (1)

My collaboration with writer and artist Elaine Reid recently resulted in co-facilitating a Visual Poetry workshop, as part of the Barn's community year-long project Flourish that she is leading. In the run up to the workshop we got together in my studio to go through the steps ourselves and create a few visual poems. Elaine already had experience with found poetry and making zentangle drawings around it but I hadn't. We would offer the participants a wide array of art materials to play with and before we could do that, we actually had to find out what would work best.

We copied a few pages of an old book onto heavy-weight mixed media paper, skim read the text without actually reading the content and circling the words that popped out.

Example of text for visual poem

We then worked with gesso (to push back the text that we didn't want to keep) and added acrylics, coloured pens, stencilling, stamping and collage material for the visual element of our found poem. I thoroughly enjoyed the experimental and subconscious process of it all!

Here are the visual poems I made in preparation for the workshop.

Visual poem with stencilling

Visual poem with collage

Visual poem with stamping and drawing

During the first half of the day, which was led by Elaine, they focussed on found poetry; skim reading, circling and trying to connect words and phrases in pencil.

Participants at work in the gallery of the Barn

Participants at work in the gallery of the Barn ©Elaine Reid 2017

Found poetry in action

Everyone would get three different pages and in just half an hour's time, the group created so many different poems from sometimes the exact same text!

The second half was led by me. We first showed them samples of our work so that they could get an idea what can be achieved.

Examples of our visual poems ©Elaine Reid 2017

Once I explained and showed them what you can do with the various art material I had brought along, it was time to play!

I brought a selection of art materials they could use

Using gesso and collage ©Elaine Reid 2017

Using a stencil to draw a shapes ©Elaine Reid 2017

Using various papers as collage ©Elaine Reid 2017

The page is now totally transformed into a visual poem ©Elaine Reid

One of the participants using pen and collage to erase text ©Elaine Reid 2017

This workshop was part of the community project Flourish ©Elaine Reid 2017

One of the visual poems a participant created ©Elaine Reid 2017

Another example of a visual poem created by a participant

Reading and hearing the feedback from all the participants afterwards I can say it was a huge success! Hopefully we can do it again next year. From 5-18 March 2018, these poems and many more will be displayed during a two-week Flourish exhibition.

Wednesday, 28 June 2017

Grays School of Art Degree Show

One of the artistic highlights for me every year is the Grays Art Degree Show where graduates show their artwork in their chosen speciality; Communication Design, Contemporary Art Practice, Fashion & Textile Design, Painting, 3D Design and Commercial Photography. Every artist also has to write an artist statement about what inspired them to make their artwork and how they did that. Some statements were very well written and highly academic. The national newspaper "The Scotsman" published a review which you can read here.

Compared to previous years I thought the standard of work was exceptional! I was especially blown away by Aigita's work. Her dedication to research and experimentation and her passion for the process of creating her own material and then making beautiful sculptures with it was truely impressive.

Here is a selection of artworks that really stood out for me.