1.6 Responding in Clay

Today we wanted to both review our trip and start working in more 3D, hands on ways. We started the session by looking through all the photos from the walk, making lots of notes on our favourite spaces, and how they made us feel. We talked about how these might form the inspiration for our art work; how what we display will be connected to the locations they are put in and the experiences of who made them.

The majority of the session was spent working with clay. We started by taking a ball of clay and getting used to how it feels and acts in our hands. We used a pinching technique to see how we manipulate the material from a ball to a large bowl shape. Once everyone had done this we all started to change the clay again into a personal response to something we saw or felt along the walk. We used our notes from earlier on to choose what to make and gradually over the session we added further materials and tools to develop the pieces.

At the end of the session we put all the pieces together to look at them. Together they formed a fantastic collection of experiments in turning our experiences into three dimensional art pieces. We discussed what we could do with the work and talked about the firing process, how some pieces may survive it better than others and that we'd see what happened! This led onto a further discussion about the fragility of what we inevitably make and display outside. As a group we made a fantastic list of lots of practical ways we could house our work, making sure that it was protected from the weather and from people who might damage them. This conversation was really useful as it helped us move into the second more practical phase of the project, and cemented the group's understanding of co-leadership in the work.