w y l y a s t l e ytie one on
I have had amazing experiences teaching/facilitating at Gage Academy this summer. I normally work with very young people and have enjoyed engaging with older kids who identify as artists and bring lots of experience of their own to the studio.
The first workshop was a weeklong class in Kinetic Sculpture. In the mornings I had middle school aged kids and after lunch high schoolers. Most students tackled design issues around physics, materials and aesthetic with considerable grace and turned out some elegant works. A few students chose not to engage with the assignments and did their own thing. That’s certainly allowable. Disappointing, but okay. I was not allowed to photograph inside the studio, but this automata was one of the three projects I taught:
We also made mobiles and a gear project where the kids got to incorporate drawings into the project. Most of these kids named drawing as their preferred medium and therefore the gear project was the most popular.
On Fridays in August I am facilitating a Teen Art Studio at Gage’s Capitol Hill location. TAS hires professional artists to come into Gage on weekend evenings to share information and projects based on a given theme or process. In August I am showing kids images, giving history and sharing processes on how to make guerilla art. We are using yarn, fabric and hand-made felt and other materials. I just taught the kids to crochet and we put our pieces together in a single tag
y a r n b o m b
and yarn bombed a stairwell at Gage. We’ll see how long it lasts…
Next week we will talk about style and aesthetic in terms of designing a motif that students will then use to develop an individual, sewn tag. I will encourage them to take their tags out in the world and photograph them. With their permission, I’ll post their images here next week.
-Thanks for visiting.
w y l y a s t l e y 