Materials Lab: Raw and Cooked

By adopting creative reuse strategies in art-making practices, artists will transform everyday objects and discards into assemblages, sculptures, and installations. When researching a common object’s history, its use, circulation, and disposal, we see the devastating consequences of extractive practices and overconsumption on our planetary health. How can artists instead, use our junk and leftover scraps to hold memory, tell stories, and evoke regenerative possibilities? While salvaging and repurposing materials, artists explore innovative ways to infuse personal meaning, cultural significance, and ecological urgency in their artwork. This workshop is structured around group critiques, individual feedback, and studio time.

Sculpture encompasses a wide range of media that can be light, hurried, heavy, or immobile. Performance can embody a scope of experiences and can be thoughtful, improvisational, and ritualistic. Throughout the week, participants create connections between object, self, and location to explore the possibilities of different combinations of interactions. Participants produce work in varying scales using various materials, including found objects and plaster casts. Connections and experiments between the object and maker are then explored through performance and/or site-specific installation. Finding the balance between object, movement, documentation, and presentation is central to the workshop.

In this workshop, we celebrate the limitless potential of the jeweler's saw by exploring the ways that this versatile tool can create an intricate, precise pattern in flat sheet metal. This pattern-forming process allows the metal to be folded into a volumetric, symmetrical 3D shape. Once the vessels are formed, we can begin to play with color by fusing powdered glass onto the surface of the metal, a technique known as enameling. This workshop is a great introduction to the world of small-scale precision metalworking. Must be 18 years old to participate.