workshop proposals

As part of my work with Start in Salford I wanted to plan a workshop or series of workshops to hold for the members I am working with. I think this workshop would work best with the Visual Arts group, as it is an environment that is very open, and the members can drop in anytime they like to continue the work they are doing as part of the classes.

Materials:

Baby books with some/all of the top layers of plasticised paper torn off

Magazines, newspapers, wrapping papers, wallpapers etc

Photographs

Stickers

Glue

Paints, pencils, crayons, inks

Scissors, craft knives

The idea behind my workshop is for participants to produce personalised books, using collage, drawing, painting and any other medium they like. In this particular workshop I would provide the participants with the cardboard children’s books that can be easily and cheaply sourced from bookshops and charity shops. These will provide a base for people to work on that is tactile and durable.

Many of the members at Start aren’t particularly artistic so by providing things for collage and painting this allows them to still produce beautiful and interesting books even if they aren’t confident with their drawing or writing skills. If this workshop was to go ahead I would let the participants know the week prior so they would be able to bring in personal things like photographs, images they like, meaningful words/lyrics/poetry etc so that the books can be made even more personal.

However a lot of the members are quite private and not particularly forthcoming with feelings and personal things, so I have also provided the opportunity for less personal but still interesting books to be made by providing things like patterned papers, wall papers etc. I think it’s important that the participants be comfortable with how personal or impersonal this workshop allows them to be, I don’t want people to feel forced into making something too open, so this workshop will just give them an option of how open they want to be.

What I like about books is that it creates a more personal relationship between artist and audience. While looking at a painting or sculpture is still very enjoyable and interesting, when you open and look at a book you interact with the work, taking time to go through the pages and reading into it, into the artists mind. This can make the book precious and treasured.

In this particular workshop, the books already exist and it’s more a case of personalising and decorating it. This workshop could be expanded to a series of classes, with each session being different ways to create books. The reason I chose to provide existing books to work on is that some of the people I work with at Start aren’t very confident in their making skills, so this provides a base for them to work on. As the weeks progress though, I reckon I could help build the members’ confidence in their skills. 

My proposal got a good response when I presented it to my peers. Because the other students are around the age of some of the younger members at Start it felt appropriate to show it to them how I’d present to the people at Start that would participate in it as they could relate easily to what I want to teach. I say this, because when some of the other groups that are doing their placements at Venture Arts and some of the care homes, we had to put ourselves in their members’ shoes so we could understand how the workshops would really be for them. This was interesting so we could really see how different it is when working with various groups and types of people and how their different skill sets and physical disabilities will affect the teaching methods and how adaptable we ourselves need to be as teachers.