The Habit of Art
Date: 10am – 3:30pm, Saturday 17 November 2018
Location: Waikanae Baptist Church, Te Moana Road, Waikanae
Faculty: Pip Adam and Rebekah Rasmussen
Cost: $75 including lunch
To register contact: kirsten@kahini.org
www.kahini.org/the-habit-of-art/
Fiction writer Flannery O’Connor worked for years as a cartoonist. She suggested that disciplines outside literature can help our writing. ‘Anything that helps you to see,’ she said. ‘Anything that makes you look’. We’d like to extend O’Connor’s idea to, ‘Anything that makes you look or listen or touch or taste or smell.’ In this one-day workshop we’ll be exploring what working in one art form (visual art) will bring to another (writing).
This workshop, co-taught by writer Pip Adam and visual artist Rebekah Rasmussen, is an opportunity to make visual art and then write.
Rebekah says, ‘In our house we draw on our bodies and paint with our fingers. We use colours. Red. Blue. Yellow. And we mix. Sometimes there is more water than there is paint. It gets messy. But we use sponges and paper to soak it all up. This is how we play. It’s spontaneous, exploratory, sensory and fun.
In this workshop we will be children again. Feeling and making through the use of hands. We will squish, smear, mold and explore different materials (associated with kids craft’s or activity’s). Through playful enquiry we will observe how different materials behave and can determine the various shapes/forms we construct. And discover how the process of letting go and having fun might inform or inhibit specific outcomes.
Caught between the throws of trial and error at any given moment, art like motherhood, like life, can’t be summed up into one final statement. They are a resolution of sorts, of what works and what doesn’t. They are a work in progress.’
After making and playing we will sit together and write prompted by the experience.
Schedule
Saturday 10.00am – Noon – Drawing Class
Saturday Noon – Lunch
Saturday – 12.30pm – 2.30 Writing
Saturday – 2:30pm – 3.30pm discussion (this could be sharing work, discussing the experience, talking about issues that have arisen.)
Limited to 25 participants. To reserve your space contact Kirsten Le Harivel at kirsten@kahini.org.
Pip Adam has published a collection of short stories, Everything We Hoped For(VUP, 2010) and two novels, I’m Working on a Building (VUP, 2013) and The New Animals (VUP, 2017). Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas. In 2012 Pip received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award and her first book Everything We Hoped For won the NZ Post Best First Book award in 2011. Pip facilitates writing workshops in universities and other settings including with people affected by crime in prisons and communities. Pip makes the Better off Read podcast where she talks with authors about writing and reading.
Rebekah Rasmussen is a mother of two young children and a visual artist living and working from her home in Wellington. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Wellington Massey University in 2013 and has exhibited regularly since. You can see more of her work at www.rebekahrasmussen.com