may workshops

In May we had two more Express Yourself workshops in our regular series at Richmond Public Library, as well as an extra pop-up drop-in workshop. Our regular group is hitting our stride, getting more comfortable together, and delving into expressing our personal identities, differences, and similarities through art.

Earlier in the spring, we had a conversation as a group about individual interests and curiosities we would like to explore in our project, as well as materials and mediums participants would like to try. Inspired by this, our May workshops used air dry clay to bring in some more tactile possibilities for participants who like to work with their hands and express themselves in three dimensions.

We discussed how different internal aspects of ourselves could be expressed externally through clay. As usual, I was blown away by the insight and creativity of participant's ideas, like representing different emotional states through intact or smooshed creatures, and creating objects the represent meaningful stories that have shaped us. After our creations dried, we used paint and drawing to add colour and detail. This project felt special to me, because both the choice of material and content were informed by participant's interests and individuality. And of course some humour found it's way in too:

For our drop-in workshop, we returned to zine making with a more in-depth spin. Using the prompt "Things I....," we made zines to explore our unique perspectives. I appreciated how even more seemingly mundane topics, like "Things I Saw on the Way Here," or "Things I Want to Remember" had the potential to express a lot of information about each artist and their view of the world.

Of course, we also did lots of sketching, doodling, and games, like the classic "exquisite corpse" AKA "make a monster," working together to create this wall of collaborative monsters to watch over our workshops: