Wednesday 20 February 2013

gathering and collecting ...


 
 
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.