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The Growing Things Workshop is a complement to Hugh O'Donnell's Body Echo Project and is often run concurrently with a Body Echo exhibition. Growing Things can bring together a group of participants diverse in art-making experience and age, or the workshop can be run with a single homogenous group. The workshop has been successfully conducted with participant's age seven - eighty years old, from company presidents who have never made art to school children, children from varied backgrounds and socioeconomic groups, learning-disabled students, graduate MFA students and art teachers.
In the workshop participants are given fruit and vegetables and asked to take a closer look at that which is usually taken for granted, the dynamic structure and design at the heart of things. The students are then asked to see this structure as a nexus of pattern and are guided in the making of schematic drawings that isolate a procedure, not for representing but rather for regenerating and embodying an operating principal that they have seen in their subject. The students then work from their schematics to make medium and large artworks. The final works produced become free-form expressions that playfully describe their own individual correspondence with the fruit. This correspondence is a kind of reflection on their own nature and as such stands as a likeness to their subject and to themselves. |
Growing Things Workshop
Tabor Academy, MA
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This process has been referred to as animistic life drawing. It is rooted in the tradition of still-life painting, and particularly the advice of C zanne, who said that when looking at an apple he did not paint the subject so much as his sensation of the subject. An example of this occurred when a group of high school students drew the same strawberry and visualized very different individual expressions that reflected a unique aspect of each author. Guillaume Appollinaire whilst looking at a painting by Roger Delauney saw a window open like an orange, a fruit of light. When students participating in the Growing Things Workshop open the orange and look into its heart, it is like opening a window through which they view their own nature in a new light. Essentially, it is poetry that generates the awe and sentient expression that occurs when two forms of nature meet in an exchange of mutual biological likeness. Poetic reverie is, after all, at the heart of these workshops and the poetic faculty is the sixth sense that kicks in to complete the full body plant needed to make sense of the world. |
Growing Things Workshop
Boston University, MA |
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Growing Things Workshop
The von Liebig Arts Center, FL
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