Prospect and Refuge: Losing and Finding Oneself in the Garden

23rd & 24th September 2023

10am – 3pm

£160 (inc all materials and VAT)

Tutor – Brigid Collins

The enclosed space of a garden provides a not only a place of refuge, but a space in which new experiences are able to be allowed in, while also not causing us to feel trapped. Being in a garden puts us in touch with the cycles of life through a witnessing of forces of death and decay and equally, of regeneration and renewal, revealing correlations between time and space, narrow and open, bright and dark, inside and outside.

Over the course the workshop you will ‘lose’ yourself in the quiet spaces offered by the garden, while ‘finding’ yourself through a process of close observation of the life-cycles of the plants and other beings that inhabit it. Over the weekend inspired by the works of artists Ellsworth Kelly, Joaquin Sorolla, Cy Twombly, Duncan Shanks and Victoria Crowe, you will gather a body of drawn, painted and written and inscribed notes, made both ‘in the garden and in the studio. You will go on to combine into richly textured mixed-media ‘pages’, gathering these together into a simple but beautiful concertina book form.
​
The workshop aims to enliven and enhance meaning in relation to the world around you by helping you to develop and deepen ways of looking, seeing, heeding, interpreting and reflecting on the experience of being in the garden. The course will assist you, through an exploration of the richly entangled relationships to be found there, in deepening your creative and emotional ​interconnectedness with a sense of both personal and universal
place.