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Running workshops has been on my ‘to do’ list for a few years and whilst completing my degree I delivered a workshop with another student for 20 of our peers. It was fun, we worked through the process with them and ultimately they all contributed to a large collaborative piece on fabric – it felt rewarding.
Delivering my first ‘paid’ workshop this month also felt rewarding and generally great! My students arrived with varied experience of printmaking but most of them had, ‘had a go at school’ at the very least and they were all adults, so they were happy to be there and excited for the day ahead. I noticed two really key moments of tension during the day, the first was when they had to actually begin to transfer their images to their blocks and the second was when they started cutting the lino.
There is an imagined pressure around ‘art’ that tells us that we need to be able to free-hand draw stuff, the fact that we nearly all can, slips quietly into the ether and we’re left with a slightly clammy palm and wondering how the hell we can get around this awkward situation! Everyone can draw, and that’s it…everyone can draw. It’s the thing you did with crayons as a child, you daub, you scribble…you make marks. Your marks are completely unique to you and they will express something of what you want to convey, and for those who need a more precise mark and haven’t twenty years to practice, there is carbon paper, tracing paper and a stack of image references to work with.
The second high pressure point was when the students started cutting their blocks, this was so interesting! Some people just grasped it and got going and others put it off as long as possible, watching their peers progress with a mounting panic in the knowledge that they were going to have to commit themselves to the cutting very soon and if they didn’t get on with it, they would then be under time pressure too…
I really felt for them, whilst I don’t worry about the image transfer to the block anymore I still feel some anxiousness when I’m cutting a block, usually when I’ve already started and it’s going well, I might come back to a block and feel reluctant to continue with it, for fear of messing up what I have already done! Ridiculous! …well, that’s how I get myself to move on, it’s all experimentation – it doesn’t matter if you ‘mess it up’ – learning will have taken place and on occasion you may end up with something more interesting!
So my plan is to work hard around these two areas to ease and improve the student experience, I think if I can help them to ‘loosen’ up a little more then they hopefully won’t hold on so tight. I used to do a bit of rock climbing, I loved it, I found it so intensely physical. There was no room left in my head for the mental side of climbing at all, consequently I wasn’t very skilled at it. The best climbers are climbing with their heads as well as their bodies, but my problem was that I could never trust the kit! I’d recently had my first child and had a healthy dose of survival instinct coursing through me at the time and I could imagine every rope, harness or climbing-buddy failure possible – so I just help on tight. I was pretty agile and very strong, so I wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t learn much about the mental side or how to improve at all! So an exercise in ‘letting go’ might be a way ahead for future workshops – ‘mark making without fear’ perhaps, or similar.
The cutting is a little easier to address, a short exercise to warm up their hands and introduce them to the materials must help. I learned that giving them a small piece of Lino to make some test marks on wasn’t quite structured enough, fine for some, but others need a little more prescription to ‘loosen up’ so I will devise a short exercise to help with that.
But oh, what fun we had – everyone was thrilled by the printing experience, the ‘reveal’ of their prints bringing joy and wonder and a few, ‘oh, it’s backwards’ comments – lovely stuff! For me, it was an intensely positive day, my energy levels – despite it being physically exhausting – were high! I felt refuelled by the contact with other humans and quietly privileged that they had all shared their creative natures in a space I had created for them. More to come.