Drawing Workshop with Artist Charlotte Mann

Drawing Workshop with Artist Charlotte Mann

Details

As part of Purbeck Art Weeks Festival (PAW) we’re excited to welcome British artist and educator Charlotte Mann to Sandy Hill Arts for a one-off pop up Drawing Lab. In this workshop participants will gather to work hard: to observe, discuss, reason and make mistakes at Sandy Hill Arts Room 14 teaching space, transformed into a unique environment, created by the artist specifically for this session.

The session will run from 10am – 5pm on Saturday the 27th of May. The workshop will culminate in an exhibition and there will be an opening event for the exhibition on Sunday the 28th at 4pm. The exhibition will close on Sunday the 4th of June.

About Drawing Lab

Drawing Lab is a project of Charlotte Mann, initially developed at the Royal Drawing school. Like mistletoe to its host tree Drawing Lab can exist in different institutions and organisations. At the moment Charlotte is running Drawing Labs at UAL: on Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, on Graduate Diploma Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art as well as the Royal Drawing school and with children at Lyndhurst Primary school.

“Drawing Lab is not just for artists. It is a place and a method of exploring the world via drawing, and exploring what drawing can help us achieve in its widest sense. Anyone can attend even if they feel they “can not draw”. There are ways in which the beginner has the advantage over the expert, an expert can be trapped by their skill. Drawing lab is a safe space where we create together an environment where we each agree to work hard, share our work and be vulnerable, everyone attending will have to be brave, the bravery of the beginner and the bravery of the expert are very different and equally impressive.

At Drawing Lab’s core is a feeling of delight in, and awe for the scientific method: as the writer and physicist Carlo Roveli puts it “(Sciences’) strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance” it is: “the passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world.” By thinking of the project space as a laboratory, and devising activities as experiments a group of people can get to know themselves, each other and the world via drawing in intense and exciting ways.

It is not a place to “learn to draw” and the focus is not on “making drawings” although we will draw all day. At its core is the attitude of valuing relationships over objects. The drawings we make in the sessions (the physical objects) are bi-products of something else, more valuable that each participant achieves independently in themselves: renewed or deeper understanding and appreciation of something in the world and the way our sensory systems allow us to experience this appreciation and understanding. We each have to achieve this independently but it is in the context of a group of similarly engaged people that we can support each other to do it best”.

“Truth is veiled but may be approached by means of observation, discussion and reasoning, where mistakes are always possible” – Carlo Rovelli

Requirements: All that is required is a willingness to engage and an appetite to learn!