Creating Layers of Meaning

Just a short post to let all of you who couldn’t make it to yesterday’s workshop (and the weather was probably an important factor, although some people made it up from the south coast) know how it went. I didn’t take any photographs myself, but Michael Walls, a student, joined us to take some (when we could get him away from the craft materials – and thanks Mike, for doing such a fabulous job!).

After the by now traditional welcome of making our own name tags and having a look at lovely materials and books brought in for inspiration, Elizabeth Kealy-Morris, our host, gave a presentation on taking collage seriously, making some reference to how she gets her students to engage with text in a humument fashion – and allowing the table groups to start some discussions on the set text (a chapter by Stuart Hall).

Different groups were approaching different quotes from the text, discussing aspects they found particularly interesting and important – and finding ways to illustrate what the text was saying through changing the format from 2d to 3d (and flexible in some cases).

Then Sarah Williamson talked about different types of knowledge and how that can be teased out and developed through using collage and layering as a tool. To finish off the morning session, book artist Angela Davies talked about her practice and work that inspires her – not only showing beautiful slides, but also bringing in some of her books so we could take a closer look. She also showed a work in progress, which was inspired by the reading for the workshop (and she has promised to let me have some photographs of how this work developed for this blog once she is done!).

During these three sessions there were already very lively discussions developing, which we at least partly were able to continue over lunch.

In the afternoon we had set an hour and a half aside just for making, and there was some very interesting explorations of layers going on.

By the end of this, we re-entered our discussion, but some of the energy was lost – or maybe people just wanted to continue making? At the end of the day there were some fascinating explorations of layers of meaning going on – some of which to be continued at home.

 

I have already been sent the image of one of the books made -exploring the taxonomy of presentational knowledge introduced in Sarah’s talk – and it also uses the structure of the tunnel book I was proposing as a simple way of exploring layers (If you want to make your own, download make your own tunnel book instructions here).

The official HEA post (including handouts and presentations) about this workshop can be found here.