for week nine it was Charley`s turn to present to us her workshop idea and have us do the activity in class. To begin with we were told to pick a sweet potato and bond with it, the potato I picked was a small one that I felt I could relate to as it seemed quite out of place in comparison to the others, which in turn is how I feel now that I have came to university and beginning to understand the student life and working in a different format to the way I would have in previous years. Once this was completed I felt a sudden paternal instinct as I felt this potato needed to be looked after and admired rather than discarded.
Above is the letter I chose and the type of stencil I made, while doing this I had made an error in judgement and cut too far from the letter, this caused the potato to come off of the rest of its body. Even though this was accidental I feel it possibly turned out for the best as I was able to work with two cut outs rather than one and both of which gave completely different finishes to the letter.
Above are some of the made up words that were generated by the class as well as pieces of my work in response to the words given. At first I felt very overwhelmed with the word on the paper as it consisted of many letters and did not make sense even if you had tried your best to decipher it, it took me a minute to become comfortable with the word but once I had many ideas came to mind and I found the rest of the words challenging yet exciting. The words that came to mind when first looking at the work were words like pattern, chaos, abstract, fragility and loneliness. I felt loneliness was an appropriate word to use as the letters/ words were alone on the page, there was a sense of misplacement and wandering within each individual letter.
I found it hard to respond to the words creatively to begin with, I did not know what work to do or how to present it however over time I became comfortable with using sharpie pens and experimenting with colour, pattern and portraiture. The class was fun and engaging and I had not done anything like this previously therefore it was a new experience entirely, Charley`s workshop was a great way to loosen the group up and was definitely more of a bonding experience.