OCA Workshop

Today I facilitated an online workshop with students from the OCA. I was invited by the Fine Art Department to do a workshop about Personal Connections and Creative Practice.

The aim of the workshop was to explore how our lived experiences, memories and personal interests can shape our artistic practice. We noted recurring themes, influences and connections that emerge in the things around us. And asked if they influence or inform what we make?

We were able to have informal conversations about our personal collected objects. With some people sharing some pretty interesting things. One person had a collection of smooth objects and one had an old teak fishing net needle from her grandfather. One person had an old ceramic bottle with a wooden cork and one person had an old address book. I took my collection of rusty objects found on my many walks.

I really like this quote from Carol Rama. She is a famous self taught artist from Turin, and she made watercolours of evocative and psychologically intense depictions of women that celebrated an overt eroticism. Later, in the 1970’s, her work moved towards abstraction and she made sculptures from different objects, for example, rubber bicycle inner tubes. Rama states a clear link between art making and therapy.

‘I’m a frightened person. My security only exists in front of a sheet of paper that has to be filled. Work is the only way of getting rid of my fears. My transgression is in painting.’

It’s only when you research that you realise how connected her lived experience was with her art making. Her father who worked at the larged bicycle tyre factory in Turin went bankrupt. And in 1933, he committed suicide.

Her statement about tyres bringing her much joy is a testament to how her art has helped her through her traumatic past. Bicycle tyres would have definitely been an object that reminded her of her father. And still, she used them in her art over the years as a cathartic process which inevitable brought her to feel joy in them as an object.

Today’s workshop was a small celebration of how our lives and objects are intertwined and how they inform our art practice. I hope those who participated enjoyed it as much as I did.