This was an artist-run workshop which I participated in with a group of Year 11 art students at Westspace gallery. The workshop was designed and run by Alice McIntosh and Nell Pearson who were exhibiting in the show ‘Real Life Fantasies’.

I found the workshop to be inspiring as it was generated through praxis, applying the theoretical to the practical (it was also a collaborative experience).

Students were given a reading to complete at home before the workshop. The paper was ‘The Uses of the Erotic’ by Audre Lorde which breaks down the patriarchal power structures that determine how people are able to express themselves. We began the session by sitting in a circle in the middle of the gallery and having a critical discussion about the paper, led by the artists.

We then sat in a new circle in another room in the gallery. We were each handed a lump of clay and a blindfold. We blind folded ourselves and were then given half an hour to sit and experience the clay we had been given. We were able to create strange sculptures free from judgement, even our own judgement. We then gathered in another room and one by one returned to the clay-sculpting room to arrange our sculptures into a collaborative piece that remained as part of the show for a few days.

The process

The final work