Different Styles and Approaches

On Thursday as part of my residency, I taught a paper-based workshop as part of the agreed community engagement.  The museum workshop space had the most amazing range of art and craft equipment.  However I wanted to use as little as possible, as I wanted the activity to continue at home where possibly the participants had very little paint, coloured pens etc.

There were 6 people booked for the day but for various reasons only 3 turned up.  This was probably a good thing as this was the first time I had taught this workshop so I got to practice with these three who embraced the activity with mostly open arms - a slight hesitation at the beginning but that’s natural when you are introducing a new idea.  All of them were in to knitting, crochet or drawing in some form but hadn’t done collage since childhood.

The workshop is called an A to Z of Me.  The aim is to build up a word portrait of yourself. In an A5 sketchbook each page is allocated a letter of the alphabet.  The first task is to create a list of words that are associated with you in various categories - colour, places, friends’ names, relatives, etc.  Then using journaling, lists, photos or words cut from magazines build each page.

The whole point is for the pages to be meaningful to the participant and not to copy my pages.  To take my suggestions and complete the pages their own way.  And they certainly did.

One lady was a planner - she spent the time planning how her book would look but using things she had at home.  One lady was a visual person and spent her time finding pictures of places she had been to in Australia.  I had provided lots of brochures from last year’s road trip and this year’s.  The third lady was more text based and searched for words or used ‘ransom note’ words.

It was a fun day.  The ladies learned some new things.  I’m debating whether to launch this workshop back home for 2027.  I’m repeating the workshop at the museum at the end of the month so I’ll see how it goes.

I’m spending today with my family.  It’s my son’s 40th birthday and hooray, I get to celebrate it with him.  The first birthday of his that we’ve celebrated together since his 19th birthday.

Thanks for joining me today.

Bernice