Demo Week and Workshops

It’s turned into a very busy August! I’ve just finished a 7-day stint in the Otago Art Society gallery for our yearly Demo Days, a week of artists working in the gallery together. It’s a very popular event on the Galleries’ calendar, with members and the public coming in to watch artist’s working and listening to the scheduled talks.

I always look forward to it. Spending most of my time working at home alone with the dog to talk to, it’s nice to talk to people for a change. I enjoy showing how I work and if you get me talking about the qualities of the materials I use you might not get away!

I also got a surprising amount of work done. Nothing like 7 days of focus without distractions at home.

I’ve also just finished running the first workshop ‘Introduction to Nara Clay’ and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m always blown away by the range of different ideas that people bring to the workshops and always come away with a few jewels of ideas myself!

I started by explaining about the qualities of the clay, moved through creating an armature, then helped with technical problems as we went. Everyone brought a different approach to the table and it was pretty exciting seeing the creations develop.

We ended up with finely detailed naturalistic, super cute and wild wacky sculptures. They days were so busy and I think we all slept like rocks particularly Monday night after a full day of hard focus.

I was stocked with the imaginative ideas and the hard work everyone put in, I have Workshop 2 to run next week and can’t wait to see the ideas coming out of that.