I have been teaching feltmaking and sculpture (found object assemblage) since 1994. This has included workshops within High Schools and Primary Schools, for private community groups as well as teaching courses at University level and supervising MFA students. I am currently completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.
WORKSHOPS 2024
Wednesday 8 May 2024
Clifton School of Arts, Clifton, NSW.
9:30am to 4pm.
BOOKINGS: Prue Watson - pruewat@gmail.com
0409461740
www.artsclifton.org
TINKERAGE: RIVETING STUFF
Sculptor and The Tinkerage coordinator, Anita Johnson, will bring a taste of The Tinkerage to the northern suburbs of The Illawarra and teach how to join found materials together and/or repair your things using pop rivets. During the day you will learn how to use a power drill, a rivet gun, tin snips, metal files, and a tube cutter. Pop rivets are a quick, strong, and creative way to make sculptural assemblages out of sheet metal and found objects. Rivets are useful to repair things. In this dynamic one-day workshop you will also learn how to make your own beautiful tube rivets that allow kinetic assemblages and mobiles. It will be riveting!
Full Price $200 / Clifton School Arts members - $180.
• Students must wear enclosed shoes to this class, bring safety glasses, and ear protection.
• If you have something that you think can be repaired or joined together with a rivet, please bring these along.
• If you already have a pop rivet gun and a small ball pein hammer, bring them too.
• The teacher will bring tools to share and materials to join as well, so if you don’t have these things don’t worry - just bring yourself and your safety gear.
3-4 August 2024
Hervey Bay Regional Gallery
166 Old Maryborough Rd, Pialba QLD
SCULPTURAL FELTMAKING
Felt is a wondrous and sensuous sculptural medium. This workshop explores beginning a wet-felted form using skin-felting techniques (agitating without water). Learn how to use wool fibres like a modelling material, make intricate solid shapes and a hollow form that’s shape is instigated by distributing differences in the amounts of wool around a resist. There will be opportunity to combine both these methods in your project. This workshop will leave you full of ideas and new skills to carry on making intriguing shapes in felt.
FRANCE _ MONTBRUN-BOCAGE
29/30 August 2024
1/2/3 September 2024
Felt as Substance (2 day workshop)
This is a workshop of exploration looking at wool fibres and felt from the point of view of being a substance for sculpture as opposed to a textile. Learn the skill of skin-felting to make hollow sculptural felt forms directly by the hand, without the use of a plastic resist. This method allows for complex shapes to be modelled in 3 dimensions. This class will also explore the ways that numerous substances interact with felted forms. Apply gold leaf, plaster, wax, putty, tar, and other substances to felt forms that can transform that felted shape into an object of structural strength, intrigue, and beauty. This workshop will leave the felt artist with many new ideas for future felt projects.
Felt and the Found Object (3 day workshop)
This class will lead students in practical ways of making sculptural assemblages using their own found objects. Make sculptures using effective hand-tool methods, screwing, wiring, and riveting things together, looking at ways that narrative can evolve from joining objects. Use the Dremel and modelling materials to make seamless joins between objects. The workshop will also explore various methods of felting around parts of the sculpture. You will learn different ways to accommodate the migration of the fibres around a solid object, thereby achieving a felt skin of integrity around the object. A pleasing contrast of hard materials against the softness of the felt can be observed when parts of the object are left to protrude, or an object may be left entirely enshrouded in its felt skin. The class will discuss how sculptural assemblage of found objects and the incorporation of felt around sections of them, can lead to unexpected narrative artworks.
BELGIUM - ESSEN
Vrouw Wolle Vilt Academie (Felt Academy)
Kapelstraat 81
B-2910 Essen ~ België
Felt as Substance _ 6/7 September 2024
Felt and the found object _8/9/10 September 2024
courses are repeated on following dates:
Felt as Substance _ 12/13 September 2024
Felt and the found object _14/15/16 September 2024
Felt as Substance (2 day workshop)
This is a workshop of exploration looking at wool fibres and felt from the point of view of being a substance for sculpture as opposed to a textile. Learn the skill of skin-felting to make hollow sculptural felt forms directly by the hand, without the use of a plastic resist. This method allows for complex shapes to be modelled in 3 dimensions. This class will also explore the ways that numerous substances interact with felted forms. Apply gold leaf, plaster, wax, putty, tar, and other substances to felt forms that can transform that felted shape into an object of structural strength, intrigue, and beauty. This workshop will leave the felt artist with many new ideas for future felt projects.
Felt and the Found Object (3 day workshop)
This class will lead students in practical ways of making sculptural assemblages using their own found objects. Make sculptures using effective hand-tool methods, screwing, wiring, and riveting things together, looking at ways that narrative can evolve from joining objects. Use the Dremel and modelling materials to make seamless joins between objects. The workshop will also explore various methods of felting around parts of the sculpture. You will learn different ways to accommodate the migration of the fibres around a solid object, thereby achieving a felt skin of integrity around the object. A pleasing contrast of hard materials against the softness of the felt can be observed when parts of the object are left to protrude, or an object may be left entirely enshrouded in its felt skin. The class will discuss how sculptural assemblage of found objects and the incorporation of felt around sections of them, can lead to unexpected narrative artworks.
