We had the opportunity to sit in on a drawing masterclass ran at the Whitworth Gallery. The class was intended for a group of foundation art students centred around communicating ideas on climate change. Deanna Petherbridge's was a focus and the class examined her use of line and word to make graphic commentaries on the wider world and furthermore worked with the School of MACE (School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering) to gain current perspectives on climate change. We felt this would give an interesting insight as to how to structure a masterclass focused around a subject.
The class was as follows:
The intention was for students to develop drawing skills to explore how complex ideas can be represented visually, allowing them to leave with a fresh perspective on the role of drawing.
The day began with warm-up drawing exercises, a 1-minute drawing of the expectations of the day.
Denise Bowler then ran some drawing exercises exploring different mark making exercises to free-up drawing.
We were given a tour of the Deanna Petherbridge Exhibition by Poppy Bowers, a curator at the Whitworth Gallery.
Artist Oliver East then took over the class, giving a presentation about his experience of drawing practice
We then gave our own presentation on the role of drawing in Architecture.
The first drawing activity was then to question; what does climate change look like? A short exercise, to draw the first picture that comes into our heads. We then lay out the drawings and walked around to see similarities and differences
The School of MACE then presented about making the invisible visible through GIS (Geographic Information Systems) climate visualizations.
Elias
Oliver East then continued the drawing class with drawing whilst walking recording architecture and outside recording space by taking us outside and walking across the groups of the gallery.
Students were then asked respond to readings of different texts around climate change such as Psychogeographic writing from Ian Sinclair, Will Self, Bill Drummond or Nick Dunn (A manifesto for the Nocturnal City) and create a list of responses to ‘What does climate change mean to you?’
Oliver East gave the example of his drawing in the rain in Romania in a grave-yard on day that Donald Trump wins the US election.
Students to generated words, and then sketched whilst listening to the following text:
"I came across this eco-park in Doncaster, a fantastic thing. If you went there by car, you were surcharged £5 a head because you were burning up fossil fuels, so everyone parked in the town, which became gridlocked. Nobody went to the site, they put on archery for kids on Saturdays, then abandoned it altogether. One security guard was posted by the perimeter fence. Grass and weeds started coming up. Now it really is ecological because it's become a wilderness. But millions of pounds have gone down the chute.”
Ian Sinclair
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/iain-sinclair-the-olympics-have-destroyed-my-patch-of-london-2304336.html
Drawings were then linked with the intention to be developed into 3D structures.
Examples of sketched produced in the class can be found here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dm1jad4quwo8qpr/AACIzxOIOiT3uA8awljnO8RAa?dl=0
