Seminar and Studio Workshop

 with Artist Elly Thomas 

 http://ellythomas.com/ellythomas.com/home.html

 Seminar:

Play and the Artist's Creative Process

Elly Thomas received her PHD from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2013. Her practice-related thesis 'Play as Evolving Process in the Work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Philip Guston and Tony Oursler' drew on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Jean Piaget and Brian Sutton-Smith and she explored "the desire to animate matter as the persistence of animistic play during adulthood". http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/mphil-phd/elly-thomas

Her seminar on 'play and the artist's creative process' was really interesting and inspiring. She introduced the audience to how artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Philip Guston employed play processes  to transform their work. The 'kit of forms' became creative toolkits for the artists; Paolozzi returning to the same elements in his sculptural works and Guston's obsession with mundane objects such as shoes. To both, the quotidian took on a strangeness, transforming into different forms and characters, developing into sculptural and painted narratives. Elly described the artists' game play as 'creative battles' and how Guston in particular needed a 'battle' to take place before his painting works could emerge. Guston did not know what the end result would be and the oppositional factor in the game play included restricted time constraints, restricted review process, accidents, and chance ; this action + process allowed Guston to find structures within the painting process. 

Paolozzi creating wax sheets

The Philosopher, 1957
Eduardo Paolozzi

I was inspired by Paolozzi's 'grammar of forms' in which the artist created sheets of elements (kit of forms) by pressing detritus from a 'modern, mass-production economy' including toys, clock parts, broken combs etc., into a clay or plaster bed and then pouring over hot wax. These malleable wax sheets were then collaged and sculptured into forms, cutting and sticking elements, evolving the piece through spontaneous action. In the Philosopher, 1957, these pressed forms can clearly be seen. This lead me to reconsider a previous work of mine and how I could develop it with Paolozzi's approach in mind. I am intending to cast the Quietly Searching (2017) figures in bronze but before I proceed with this I am now considering recreating the wooden post element from a moulded form designed by pressed artefacts pertinent to the narrative. I will use an element from my crow series to become an embedded signature within the piece.

 

Quietly searching, 2017
Sara Jayne Harris

Workshop: 

The studio workshop activity - creative battle -required us to think on our feet and was time constrained to 1hr. Using materials and imagery to hand from my collection of 'useful-stuff', I proceeded to wrap blocks of wood with photocopied photographs of my ancestors. These quickly took on animistic forms and became movable puppets for me to play out scenes from improvised scripts. I particularly like the distortion the blocks gave the imagery and how this provided further opportunities for playful discourse. I am keen to continue this playful approach in my creative process as it has the potential  to loosen up my ideas and extend my fine art practice. 

    

Mother Past, 2018
Sara Jayne Harris

Past Mother Past, 2018
Sara Jayne Harris