AFTER LONG ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES…and so finally, after much delay and organisation, I was finally given permission to begin the 'space' workshops, but not at the International School as was planned, but instead the Waldorf Schüle also here in Weimar.
COMPROMISES A couple of compromises had to be made, one of them being that I was only given permission to work with older students, however the experience has been so far really good and the impressions and comments I have been given are that the workshops have been really inspirational and 'eye opening'
THAT STRUCTURE WORD The structure of the workshops have also had to have been condensed as class time is both precious and it has been quite a challenge to even organise the time that I have been given due to the all the other time constrains of both overseeing teachers, class times and students etc... Therefore, I will continue to update the progress as it happens...
IN TO IT The first assignment we have worked on in this series of workshops is exploring the idea of inner space and more succinctly the idea of boundlessness. Through meditation and then silent drawing with blindfolds, the participants have been able to explore a new type of space and one that has previously been undiscovered. The results of the drawing thus far have been both remarkable and even outstanding - as the participants spend 28 minutes of their life in this brave new world of inner space…
FOLLOW UP The follow-up group discussions have also been interesting, with students talking about how they felt and how their approach to this type of visual communication was altered. We have also looked at the artist - Yves Klein's idea of the void and how that relates to this process on the idea of infinite space…
YVES KLEIN SAID... As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.
MORE TO COME Workshop classes will continue over the next couple of weeks with more ideas - one of which will be the execution of a communal blindfold Action Painting/Drawing…
FINE PRINT For reasons of privacy, I have only been able to upload images that focus on the work, avoiding showing people's faces, but I am hoping to get permission to include more images soon…
CHECK OUT THE FIRST IMAGES!
WORKSHOPS CONTINUED...
Starting off with power meditation, the group harmonised their collective energy and entered the deep space. The students were asked to explore what lay beyond the frontier of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 light-years away...
The findings were remarkable. The group talked about how moving and travelling together in this new way, provided a shared unison of consciousness that they had not expected to be so strong.
Feedback Board from Workshop 3...
WORKSHOP 4
The next workshop involved drawing from the experience of collective inner/outer space exploration and create living forms based on what the students felt most accurately reflected how they imagined what lives beyond the vast depths of space. Other questions were also posed and explored, how the creatures moved, what noises they made, what was the gender. The masks were made from round objects and rubbish - the combination provided both highly artistic creations and interesting ways of exploring creature replication possibilities. Avocado skins were turned into eyes, potato sack mesh transformed into reptile skin, foil and shoe horns, even the German national flag was re-interpreted. There was something very Lars Von Trier about the whole mood and students took me to a place near the school that acted as an alien landscape, enabling them to run and move about in their new found territory of 'the beyond'.
