Conversations in Colour - Session 5

In the Artlink building there are four stained glass windows depicting the four seasons. What we found out today is that the theme of four seasons continue within the building, making temperature on each floor higher than the one underneath, so by the time we climbed up the stairs, to the studio, we entered the beautiful summer’s day.

  

It was so warm that we opened all the windows and the sunshine streamed in making printing colours glisten and shine. The prints came pouring out, with a fantastic array of colours. People were astonished, and even the most perfectionist and critical participants were soon taken over and carried away by the unexpected beauty of their own work! One woman who said she only liked one of her prints changed her mind and said – I like them all now ! Soon everybody finished their linos, descended back into the spring temperature of the room below, and the second group came up to enjoy the summer! 

They started tie-dyeing cloth. Most people have never done it before, but were amused with the shapes of the bundles of tied cloth.  They looked like some strange creatures, which were then painted with textile colours. We dried the cloth with a hairdryer and soon we were all opening the cloth and seeing what effects we were getting. It reminded me of the emergence of the butterflies from a cocoon. We are going to tie dye some cotton bags next time!

                                                     

On this gorgeous day, the writing group began with an icebreaker – ‘which weather do you feel like today?’ Then we proceeded to discuss emotions and states of mind and to write group poems.  We did this by finding different metaphors for these emotions, in the process discovering some strong images.  The rough drafts were all excellent and had a lot of potential so the problem was choosing which to develop.  When editing, one group of participants initially tried to find a narrative in their words but finally decided to focus mainly on condensed images, which meant that it was up to the reader to fill in the gaps. Another group put emphasis on the narrative in theirs and discarded words and phrases that didn't fit.   Condensing is a key element to writing poetry and I was pleased that the participants discovered this through the process of working together.

As we moved towards the end of the session, one participant commented that she hadn’t thought she was creative but that the project was allowing her to see that she had been repressing that part of herself and that really she was extremely creative.

In the second part of the session, I took the people who had been creating tableaux to correspond with their writing last week.  They began to put together two performance pieces which are really starting to come to life.  I look forward to developing this with them further in coming weeks. 

 Milena Dragic and Becky Cherriman