Lakeside Arts Centre, Djanogly Gallery, Michelle Stuart exibition
Art with Nature and Colour
Chemistry sessions, Feb 19th.
Really great to meet
everyone who took part in the sessions with me yesterday at Lakeside Arts
Centre, you all had some really wonderful ideas. Below are some images I took of some of the things you were
experimenting with.
The morning session with
families involved lots of gathering and collecting outside – and some wonderful
land art appeared as we arranged and made patterns with the things we were
collecting. There was some really
clever balancing of sticks and some amazing stories that emerged. Back inside we carried on creating images
with our natural finds – and even more stories were created.
In the afternoon session
with young people, we again went outside and gathered as many interesting
natural objects as we could – we collected a hoard of sticks, cones, seeds,
leaves and moss. We gathered lots of
alder cones to create a natural dye (alder often grows by water and at the
moment has lots of cones and catkins and the twigs have an amazing purple
colour which really stands out in the sun).
Back inside we experimented
with pestle and mortars, mallets and mashers – we ground up soil, burnt wood
ash, sticks, leaves and seeds. This
gave us a range of colours to work with and we set the alder cones simmering in
water with cotton and sheep’s fleece.
The technique of using a mallet to pull the colour out of leaves worked
really well and some very beautiful images emerged onto cloth. There was some great frottage (rubbings) of
leaves, some printing with mud and lots of painting and collage. Some lovely little books were created too,
some wonderful tiny trees and much more.
