Reading the City

Reading the City seeks to deconstruct and understand the city as a site of transformation and change; urban space as a geographic and temporal phenomena, a manifestation of social, political or economic trends, a stage on which to play out the human narrative and locate our personal stories, the embodiment of collective desires and dreams.

The course focuses on tactics that artists, writers and theorists use to; represent the city, to effect political or social change, to map it, walk it or try to capture its ebb and flow. People whose work suggests daily practices, subversion and intervention as a way of re-shaping the world around them. The sessions are loosely based around the themes: The city as archive, Mapping & walking the city and Nutopia- thinking about future cities.

The weekend workshop will be a balance of lectures and seminars and practical hands on workshops where students will go out and make manoevers. Please bring a pen, paper and a camera phone if you have one or digital camera for visual note making.

Artist/Tutor: Jennie Savage is an artist who seeks to transform people's perception of place through the creation of mediated experiences. Working Site specifically she explores the place between public spaces, town planning, constructed landscapes and the human story: the lived lives and personal narratives connected to those sites.

Workshop Fee: £68, Concs £48, Bath SU £32

Sat 27 & Sun 28 Apr

10am-4pm,
3 West North

Tutor: Jennie Savage

Travels in Textiles

Discover some new art and textile techniques and processes to create a unique and meaningful record of a journey, holiday or memorable place. Using photographs, paper souvenirs (postcards, brochures, maps) and other memorabilia from a recent trip, you will create a folding book or collage to remember it with. We will use bonding techniques, printing and simple stitch methods to make this object.

We will begin the day with a look at some contrasting ways to commemorate a journey and start to brainstorm our ideas for an individual piece. This will be followed by a practical session to experiment with different techniques which can be joined together to create a finished piece. Students should be able to leave the course with the basis of a complete work, which they can continue to add to.

Anne will provide the bonding medium, some blocks for printing and paper and fabric remnants to use as a base for your book or collage. It is recommended that you bring some copies of photos, paper items, maps and brochures from the place you are using as your theme and any old domestic (not valuable) fabrics or scraps that can be recycled in your piece. Any poems or words that express the feeling of your place would also be useful.

Artist/Tutor: Anne Kelly works as a collector of fabric, paper and ephemera using fragments of fabric, stitch, photographic and print processes to create richly embellished collages, book forms, large and small free hanging and framed pieces in cloth. These have been described as small worlds and her pieces started life as mainly botanical in subject matter before developing into larger more narrative works. She assembles and reassemble the components of each piece using sketchbooks and digital imagery. Often it can be a small scrap or remnant of fabric that inspires a whole piece. She is currently co-writing her first book Connected Cloth due out in 2013. This reflects her teaching, installation, exhibition and collaborative work in the UK and abroad. After training in Canada and Goldsmiths College, London, Ann has taught a variety of age groups and set up an award winning textile department.

Workshop Fee: £28, Concs £20, Bath SU £10

Sat 23 Feb

10am-4pm,
Textiles Room, Hayesfield School

Tutor: Anne Kelly

Mixed Media Landscapes

Learn new skills and explore the possibilities in mark making, fabric and surface using creative hand and machine embroidery techniques and experimenting with mixed media, mark making and collage to explore landscapes you have travelled. The ideas behind the workshop is that participants begin with a series of experiments to develop observation and mark making skills, as well as developing embroidery skills as an experimental medium using a variety of different yarns and threads. This is to enable you to create dynamic and experimental textures but to also explore your own creativity, explore colour, composition and texture. To also improve your range of expression and the possibilities there is within them. We shall also look at the landscape as a means of potentiality.

Artist/Tutor: Rosalind Davis is a mixed media painter interested in transformation, material and surface, creating paintings of dystopian landscapes which incorporate paint and embroidery. Her work explores the power, presence and socio-politics of urban landscapes. The work is an examination, documentation and questioning of the ideals of utopia and dystopia in the form of social housing as well as natural and manmade disasters. Rosalind Davis is a graduate from the RCA and Chelsea College of Art and has exhibited nationally and internationally with work in both private and public collections. Davis is currently exhibiting at the Courtauld Institute: The East Wing X Material Matters Exhibition, 2012-13.