Clip from Haptic Experiencing (working title) 9-way split screen video
Haptic clay workshops combine therapeutic modalities with the inherent artistic knowledge of participants though embodied participation. There is no expectation to make 'a piece of art' or 'a product'. There is no competition, no judgement, but an understanding that this time and place offers permission for release from everyday pressures and concerns. Haptic engagement with clay stimulates a deep-seated primal awareness response in the brainstem, and access to the unconscious. The workshop is guided either through spoken word, or through visual visual prompts, or scores. The frontal cortex is circumnavigated, allowing the inherent truth carried in the subconscious, the body and hands, (the fleshy and hitherto silent, medium of knowing), to extend itself into the clay, like a malleable prosthetic limb, to become an extension of the subconscious. Here the participant freely creates and destroys, engaging in haptic communication with unconscious memories, urges and secrets in an iterative process of symbolic modelling taking a front view seat in a theatre of three-dimensional unconscious process.
A hybridised rendering of the dream state unfolds - primal knowing, deep understandings, personal concerns manifest.
In a world increasingly mediated by technology, the workshops provide powerful insights into the inherent understanding and creativity held in the self and the body.
In themed group and family workshops, individuals develop their haptic self-awareness. Participants work collaboratively on projects, simultaneously building trust and respect while manifesting the subject in sculptural form. The embodied process can bring about a transformative awareness of fnudamental human connection with materiality, and an understanding of the beyond-human.
A hybridised rendering of the dream state unfolds - primal knowing, deep understandings, personal concerns manifest.
In a world increasingly mediated by technology, the workshops provide powerful insights into the inherent understanding and creativity held in the self and the body.
In themed group and family workshops, individuals develop their haptic self-awareness. Participants work collaboratively on projects, simultaneously building trust and respect while manifesting the subject in sculptural form. The embodied process can bring about a transformative awareness of fnudamental human connection with materiality, and an understanding of the beyond-human.
Artist's collaborative workshop (no previous experience of clay)
Consider the possibility of sharing the haptic experience through collaboration… to encounter your partner’s haptic excavations Tentatively, with your partner’s permission, move your hands into the boundary area, notice what that feels like, and compare your tactile experiences… , slowly move around the structure, notice the changes of form, temperature, and rhythm inherent in the making... notice the feelings this invokes...
Consider the possibility of sharing the haptic experience through collaboration… to encounter your partner’s haptic excavations Tentatively, with your partner’s permission, move your hands into the boundary area, notice what that feels like, and compare your tactile experiences… , slowly move around the structure, notice the changes of form, temperature, and rhythm inherent in the making... notice the feelings this invokes...
Clay and Calm workshops for adopters and adoptees
Haptic guided meditation (above) Documenting the experience in drawings (below)
“At first, I thought I was shaping the clay.
Then the clay began shaping me.
You gave us permission
to enter relationship with matter…
to remember
the body knows how to make meaning
before language arrives
I am still dancing inside that making.”
Feedback (extract from a poem by Helen, workshop participant)
Richmond-on-Thames Arts and Ideas Festival.
Our Riverbed Workshops with 6 Collective. Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham
Somatic Clay workshops, Encounters with the Thames Foresore, Riverbed themed plaster-mould workshops.
Ema (Shinto) Workshops with SMCC. Riverside Gallery, Richmond.
Our Riverbed Workshops with 6 Collective. Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham
Somatic Clay workshops, Encounters with the Thames Foresore, Riverbed themed plaster-mould workshops.
Ema (Shinto) Workshops with SMCC. Riverside Gallery, Richmond.
https://wearefamilyadoption.org.uk/