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Collaboration with Rupert Higham, Lecturer for Learning, and his Dialogic Elective students.

Workshop plan.

Part 1 – Learning journeys

Using imagery, colour and shapes.
Illustrate your journey to the current position with materials / Represent turning points, moments of realisation, spark points and critical incidents, tensions and opportunities / What might these findings look like. It can be a map, a series of symbols or lines or colours. This overview of how you got to where you are now / Include anything you heard this morning that may have inspired you or disturbed you in a good way / Allow the material/paint/oil pastel to take you places too.

Part 2

Current barriers and opportunities – working in pairs.

 
Concerns and barriers borders and frontiers. What are they what have you each encountered / What do they look like. How can you represent them / The geography of them, the shape of them / Are they the same as your partner’s? / Discuss with this partner the similarities and differences. Creative conversation. Feed back in pairs to larger group / How might they be overcome or processed or used to your advantage.

Part 3

Where can this go? Group work. On very large sheet of paper.

Make a collective group collage/drawing of what can be formed / What you can develop in your settings and what kind of creative community or network (with the Faculty and each other) you could make in the future /  What elements would it contain, what support could it offer, what shape will it be / What would this community look like?

The idea for the pod came from a scene remembered from an old french black and white film that has lived in my mind. A narrative that evolves from a room within a room, created by the characters, as their own private space. I planned to appropriate a little of this film to screen or show as a thumbnail on the outside of the pod and the inside to act as a mini cinema for showing the Happiness film (compilation film from clips sent to me on this theme from the Masters students and larger Faculty community) and as a collapsible mobile space that can be used again.

Although the scene was so fresh and vivid in my mind I could not remember the title of this film. Many people I asked had a recollection of this scene but no-one could remember where it came from – Les Enfants Terrible, Le Grand Meaulnes, Les Enfant du Paradis, Les Amants des Pont Neuf were the popular possibilities but did not contain it.

The pod began as a maquette and was tried out in many forms. I wanted it to be made with simple inexpensive materials. Finally, in a garden, a structure evolved with bamboo sticks simple and sturdy. This was re-created in a room in the Faculty and was clad in packaging paper donated by DS Smith plc (end rolls), fitted bespoke and stapled together for easy assembly and dis-assembly.

On discussion with colleagues and friends we wonder if we have then imagined this scene. That the camp or den, the room within a room exists in our collective memories, from childhood, den-making, camp building – somewhere that is our space away from adults and others, a place for separateness,  but share-able with friends.

Woolwinder messages

A beautiful old woolwinder was placed in ‘the street’ and masters students and others in the Faculty wrote inspirational, funny, original heart felt messages and testimonies for International Women’s Day and attached them on the woolwinder. I intended to take the woolwinder to Parliament Hill Fields and release over London on IW Day itself.