Shared Ground

Today was the first day of workshops and my intention was to slowly introduce everyone to a set of ideas and skills to develop their knowledge of artists’ book practice and simple production methods.

There were a number of outcomes I had in mind in planning this session. I wanted to develop a sense of confidence in everyone to put them at ease with the project aims and their ability to carry them out. I wanted to design some engaging activates which further integrated the two student groups. I wanted my students to get involved in the teaching delivery to accelerate their own confidence in their skills too.

To do this I used my own collection of artists’ books as initial browsing activity to get every settled into the session. I invited my colleague les Rowe to come and talk about has photographic work and how he incorporates his images into artists’ book. I delivered a half hour PP presentation on artists’ book which have responded to place to contextualise the practice of book making and to further discuss approaches to our project brief. After a quick break we then had a micro teaching session, splitting the group of around 36 into 5 groups of 6 students. Five different folded book processes were taught by me and my volunteer students and we circulated the groups so everybody got to make a set of five books.

This was a busy but hugely enjoyable morning and by lunchtime everyone was buzzing with good feedback and my ‘teacher’ students were beaming with their achievement. A fantastic atmosphere was developing.

After lunch, to intensify this experience, I had loosely devised some group challenges to put these new skills to a creative test. The small groups were reformed and off we went…..

Task 1 was to create a collaborative group book with as many pages as possible using a prescribed method learned in the morning session in only 10 minutes.

They got stuck in straight away, no time for deliberation and this seemed a key point. Discussion came later as they considered construction, allocated roles and design solutions.

A great sense of purpose descended on the previously noisy space and a low hum of focussed activity took place. It was a noticeably significant shift as they all started working together efficiently.

After 10 minutes I first weighed the books, something I hadn’t warned them about. It accentuated the competition between the 5 groups, but I wanted to use the weight to make a point about materials used versus pages gained.

Once we established the scale from lightest to heaviest book I asked them to calculate the pages of each book. The competitive edge resumed as page numbers mounted and a heated discussion emerged around what constituted a ‘page’ in some of the more sculptural folded forms used.

In the end it emerged that the lightest weight book at 68 grams had the most pages at 889, not a bad gain for 10 minutes of making!

Task 2 required each group to make a collaborative book with ex library books of English and US landscape imagery as content and using any of the five book forms they had learned that day, in 30 minutes.

Again there was a quiet buzz of ideas being discussed, roles assigned and making taking place very quickly and they each group produced an unexpectedly well thought out and executed book. The book structure chosen by the groups were really well considered. Even the most tricky, the blizzard binding was used and each method was rationalised into the concept of the entire book.

Joe Ostraff and I were just so impressed at the speed in which our respective groups had bonded with each other over this first day and how they had soaked up everything I had exposed them to in such an intense day.

After all that hard work we headed to the beach and Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ to chill out………………………

We have had really positive day of introductions and presentations today and I think we have established a really positive bond with the BYU students and staff.

I had asked my students and colleagues to each give me an image of a place of significance to them and a short explanation about their choice. My intention was to create a sense of biographic engagement with the topography of Liverpool and Wirral and to bring out our personal histories in an indirect way.

At the outset I was not fully expecting the depth of feeling and emotional connections which would emerge from this exercise, but as I put the information together I began to realise that a rich source of ideas was forming and that I was learning a great deal about the individual in the group myself.

Today, as each of our students spoke to the whole project group, the sense of importance of ‘place’ as a site for personal identity and experience and the thematic strengths of the idea became clearly understood by our group and resonated with our visitors too.

I was really impressed with the composure and articulation of my group, nine of whom are 1st years. They were asked to speak to a large group of at least 45 people and as first timers that is a daunting task. Small group seminars will be a doddle from now on!

It also acted as a way in to ask each other questions and to begin a continuing dialogue with each other. The room was buzzing with conversations so we seem to have got off to a great start.

BYU’s presentation completely awed us with the scale and quality of their Utah campus facilities and were were impressed by the standard and range of works represented within their group.

There is a lot of curiosity from both sides about how we differ in our teaching and learning delivery, the structure and length of our courses and our differing skills.

Since I posted this I have asked the students from both colleges to give me some feedback about today. Here are Carolyn and Keala from BYU and Lottie from WMC with their initial impressions about meeting us on their first day at Wirral Met ……….

Carolyn Beefelt BYU

I was surprised by how kindly we were received by the college, it made me feel like we were important. A combination of new information and jet lag made the initial orientation somewhat confusing, but when I saw the artists’ studios I became really excited to work together with this group.

Keala Kau BYU

Wednesday was a very fun day. As BYU students we were excited, but unsure what to expect. But as we arrived and got to know the other students we got more excited to work and create friendships. It’s been interesting to learn the differences between our schooling processes as well as to see and compare the work of other students across the world. Going to visit the studios was one of my favourite parts of the day. I learned very quickly that we have a lot of opportunity to learn from each other!

Lottie Millington from WMC

Meeting people for the first time can be difficult as it is, but knowing that a group of students are coming all the way from America to meet us and experience our culture and the way we make art, it can put quite a lot of pressure on you.

I felt really nervous and anxious today. I even had the shakes, which is when I am really apprehensive. I was quiet blown away by the size of the group, but absolutely made up once I got chatting to them. Everyone from Utah came across as very genuine, kind and caring people.

They are interested and intrigued by our accent and our culture, and I felt proud to talk about our own country. They are very enthusiastic people who have a drive in art and they already look at life from an art point of view.

I would like to find out more about their lives in America and about their experience of US art education.

IN 2009 I took a group of 10 students to BYU Utah to take part in a project called Mapping the West. It was a fantastic experience for us all. We worked along side 35 other students and staff and produced some interesting and thoughtful printed artists’ books.

And now we are doing it all over again in the damp English spring weather instead of the dry Utah desert.

I spent today getting all the college’s final arrangements in place and working with my first year group to set up a public project wall in the main corridor space on our 12 Quays campus. The project wall is intended to be a comminiation device for everyone on the project to add to and to allow every in the college not taking part to see what we are up to.

These fisrt year helping me are part of a group of 20 students and staff who will be working on the Shared Ground project from WMC. We have been making preparations for the project for some time now and are in a heightened state of anticipation and, most probably, anxiety too.

We are hosting a group off 22 BYU arts students and two professors, Joe Ostraff and Sunny Taylor from their BAFA programme.

Tomorrow we will meet them all and host an introductory event to bring all the participants together, get them thinking about the project themes and generally break the ice.

My job is to keep the project focused and moving forward with all the learning activities we have arranged. I’ve got a team of colleagues who have been fantastic in supporting me through the preparation period. Everyone in college has been informed of what we are about to do so it will be interesting to see what feedback we get from those outside looking in at us from other courses and departments.

I’ll explain more about the project brief in later posts.