Online workshops
During Spring 2020, I began developing an online workshop which I’ve successfully delivered to a number of groups from art organisations across the U.K including Chisenhale Studios (London), Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh), Spike Island (Bristol) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham).
I am also able to design and deliver custom workshops depending on group’s requirements and needs.
Lockdown workshop with Bryony Gillard
In this workshop I will share some of the powerful and simple exercises I have gathered in my workshop ‘carrier bag’* over the years. They are all strategies for building collectivity within groups, keeping active, critical and creative when in isolation and using improvisation in its purest form - as a tool for listening & responding in the present moment. Working with the limitations of meeting online, we will use Zoom’s user settings creatively, respond to glitches and feedback & work collaboratively in google docs to create together.
My hope is that the exercises will be taken away from the digital realm and into the physical world, wherever collectivity needs to be nurtured.
Sources of inspiration come from a broad range of intersectional thinkers including Audre Lorde, H.D, Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Maree Browne, Roxanne Gay, Paul B. Preciado, Sara Ahmed, Bell Hooks, Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler, amongst others.
Each workshop participant is mailed a pack of postal resources (if able to receive mail safely) consisting of printed materials as a way of countering the heavily screen based direction our lives have had to take. Each pack is put together in a clean environment, double enveloped and sent well ahead of the workshop date to allow for quarantining if necessary.
The workshop is aimed primarily at creative practitioners, but the exercises are universal and may be particularly interesting to anyone involved in community organising and grassroots activism given the source materials we explore. The workshop also exists as a self-led guide which can be emailed to participants not able to join the workshop.
If you are interested in programming or attending a workshop, please email me.
If you are BIPOC or LGBTQI+ and would like to receive the self-led guide or attend a future workshop free of charge, just drop me an email.
*to quote Ursula Le Guin’s incredible The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986
