My Dog Sighs

Lost and Found workshop

Many thanks to My Dog Sighs, who joined us today for a workshop and tasked the first years with finding a discarded item which they could up cycle into a characterful animal.

They returned with a wide array of found items to transform into original artworks and then return to the original location, photograph and leave behind, to be found and possibly kept by a passer by. Inspired by artworks shown by My Dog Sighs the students were introduced to the concept behind Free Art Friday, a global community of artists creating work which is returned and left for any member of the public to take home and enjoy.

The weeks so far spent studying the characteristics of the animals is becoming more apparent in the pieces the students produced.

Drawing in the air

Researching into animals according to Shakespeare is yielding some fascinating results; you should never come between a dragon and its wrath, rats would desert the vessel described in The Tempest and the goat is coming across very cheekily. The next stage for the students is to vigorously research and develop ideas to convey some of these results, how can wrath, desertion and cheekiness be conveyed with a drawing, a sculpture, an animation or a photograph?

This workshop involved 'drawing' with wire of varying thicknesses (and it is easier said than done) to encourage the students to explore spacial and gestural properties they could employ in their explorations with conveying their animal and the specific focus they are working towards

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SHAKESPEARE'S Animals - the first workshop

Welcome back all our first years after what was hopefully a lovely (and well earned) Christmas break. Today we started the new project 'Shakespeare's Animals' (The Illustrated Menagerie's focus this year) with a warm up workshop involving charades, a Mexican wave, some 'exquisite corpses' and label line work.