Dimensional Memoir

Workshop offering at AVA Center for the Arts

Saturday Sept 15 and 29 from 12:00-3:30

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The first session will be a tour of the current shows in each of the four gallery spaces. Focusing on my exhibit “Other Alphabets: Dimensional Memoir,” we will explore the use of numerous elements to visually create a sense of memory from combining objects in a variety of ways to tell a story, and we will tour the concurrent exhibits which also work with text/subject/object. Participants are encouraged to bring a sketchbook or journal to jot down ideas for their own creations. From there we will go to the studios where each workshop participant will be able to create their own clay vessel to contain their objects and text. Participants should collect small meaningful items: photos, poems, and favorite phrases to use on their containers, or as prompts, and feel free to bring other things that inspire you–books, images, objects from nature. Be creative–think of things you can bring to impress into the wet clay as well as those you will use in your own personal project. Your piece can be as simple as a flat slab on which to decoupage a photograph or as complex as a lidded container to hold ashes of a precious pet.

 When we meet back for the second session, the containers will have been fired and we will be ready to “narrate.” We will work with prompts and develop our stories and how to visually suggest emotion and connection. Before we adjourn, we will spend some time experiencing each other’s work and how we will use this workshop to jump more deeply into our future projects.

About the photograph:

In the summer of 2017 I attended the BayPath University writing conference in Dingle, Ireland. Organized by Suzanne Strempek Shea, she brought on board a group of instructors and staff including Dinty Moore, Charles Coe, Ann Hood, Elinor Lipman and the inimitable Tommy Shea. We wrote hard every morning and I produced pieces in both Dinty and Charles’ workshops that I’m reproducing as memoir for the exhibit at AVA.

“Why We Are Artists in 6 Chapters, a prayer: Chasing the Dragon,” is testimony to the creative process. The writing prompt was to end the micro piece with the words ‘for ever and ever, amen,’ after reaching into our memory banks to find a moment in time that deeply influenced us as writers.

I was only about four or five years old when I was blessed with the awareness of artistic ‘flow’, and have been traipsing around after it ever since.