Rory Champion DACA Group

 

 I have chosen Unit X as replacement of my studio practice to hopefully gain experience with working with the community and especially young people with the plan of training to become a teacher in the future. I think the experience am going to get through working in a secondary school will prove to be invaluable in the learning process and hopefully help me to develop and inform my studio practice at the same.

   First Week At Stockport Studios 

     In the very begins of Unit X we attended workshops and tutorials to help us as a group gain the inspiration and possible knowledge we need to produce our own piece of art work in the community wether it be with young people or arts for health.
  In the first instance we started unit x by going down to the Stockport studios to be introduced to the basics you need to know to get a group of people to work together. We were introduced to our group to understand there background and pervious experience working with the community and in groups of people. As artist we got to know each other by producing mugs with our personal designs on them to represent our partner, this enabled to ask detailed questions and discover more about our colleagues.
 We then worked on as a group basic projects and experiments where we were told to bring in some materials to produce a piece of work based on set criteria wether it be food or places we lived. this also opened up our imagination on how workshops could be run and how to handle people. Certain people in the group were given tasks to do by the tutors for example to be loud, disruptive or even quiet and non productive, this enabled us to learn how to adapt to specific situations that you may not expect and will have to learn to deal with to be successful.
    We then Looked at how we could manage and work with people and how our knowledge or creative experience could help the people we work with. I looked at the possible opportunities it would enable them to gain in terms of possible health benefits to even carrier paths and advice i can offer as a practitioner.

Workshops In Chatham 

One of the first workshops I did was working with the ideas of recycling and I thing this is a very important and interesting outline for a workshop and has lots of scope for lots of interesting work. Recycling and re using of materials has become and will continue to become more important and i think the more people that become aware of how we can re use things to produce something interesting again can only be a good thing. It also is something that is quite cheep and as a practitioner starting out this may be your only option to use cheep materials and mastering this is important. This workshop we did was working with used plastic bags that we cut up and sewed in a way that formed the bag cutting into a much more tactile object that we could put into colours specifically to make int murals or even spell out words and things.

Diagram I made from the workshop

We then Adapted this to make the shapes into something else and used the idea of stitching the material to develop the strength and ability to manipulate it into the shape you want and formed some bunting.

I think i learnt a lot from doing this activity, especially how we can use materials to redevelop them into something that has a different function. Ideas of the transformative are quite present in my own work so i would really like to tie this into my future workshop ideas and develop them further. 

      Later in the week we did a workshop focused on maybe younger groups of people because It used materials that could be eaten after the workshop was completed this ads a whole new side to the workshop that instantly grabs your attention so would be good for young children. Even when we as adults were introduced to the prospect of producing something out of sweets we were completely fascinated, the work that followed showed the concentration because people developed lots of crazy and interestingly intricate objects with them.  I think this could be used in lots of different applications and has as an idea lots of range and possibilities such as large scale modes that could be put into stop-motion animation to a narrative they create.  

I think that this workshop went well but i think you could only use it for a younger age group because of reasons such as hygiene and it would be difficult to associate it with any context other than maybe recycling or maybe peoples reaction to food in art ad how the reaction to other senses such as taste alter the perception of a piece of art. I would like to develop this project to be much more into something that is a short project i think its best assets is its instant interst with the audience and i think this would be useful if you wanted engagement. 

This is another project that enabled us to further understand the way in which we could get people to think abouth the ways that they can work together to produce group work.