Sunday, 21 January 2024
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This is the third of three artist workshops brought to you by Stirchley Art Room as part of The Great Stirchley Sketchbook Circle which is funded by Birmingham City Council - Beyond 2022
It will run for 3 hours and include; artist-led demonstrations, materials for you to play with, and outcomes, techniques and inspiration to take home.
Elsewhere Inklings with Hannah Pugh
‘Awe has always been available to us. It’s an artefact of our own attention, rather than a force that emanates from magnificent things. It is perpetually nearby, but we like to imagine that it’s far away, a place that we visit on once-in-a-lifetime holidays, rather than a practice that we can foster across a lifetime. I believe those vulnerable, ground-shifting encounters like awe, wonder, fascination and mystery are crucial to our survival. There’s enchantment in between everything when you stop to notice.’ (Katherine May)
Come join us for a hands-on creative event where you can let the mediums of ink, bleach and salt lead you to create intuitive paintings which can then be worked into using metal leaf and pen, resulting in a personal 'Elsewhere Inkling' and other alchemical pieces. This in-person event will take place at Stirchley Library, an accessible and welcoming venue. Skills covered in the workshop will include creating distance to invoke awe and epicality, trusting your mark making, the importance of space within composition.
Get stuck in and unleash your creativity, learn new skills, and create something unique as Hannah guides you through the process of following your intuition and allowing the mediums to create enchantment on a page.
About Hannah Pugh
'I magpie and hoard ideas, which melt together and jostle around, connecting and reforming and shouting and whispering their way onto the canvas. The places I escape to when painting are invoked from memory, imagination and words; referencing earthly landscapes, yet belonging to the realms of nowhere. All part of a larger place, which I’ve come to think of as Elsewhere.
Where’s your Elsewhere? Hopefully you might glimpse it whilst looking into one of my pieces.
For my dissertation I discovered words about the Sublime - that huge awe-inspired idea beloved of Romantics and Philosophers down the ages; their attempt at quantifying the immense terrifying beauty that can be found in our existence. How can excruciating fear and crippling ecstasy exist together? How can the abstract ideas of love and hate be completely polar and yet part of the same whole? Nothing is as simple as light and dark, above and below… If these opposites come full circle where is it that they meet - where is the liminal place? Where, is the liminal place….? The idea of liminality - a place between, a threshold, a place of ambiguity or disorientation, conjures itself up in a lot of my paintings as the horizon. Circles appear that might symbolise the cyclical nature of being, and taking lessons from Japanese art’s composition, what’s left out of the picture is just, if not more, important than what is - because the cracks are where the light gets in - obviously.
I’m fascinated by the secrets and stories that are all around us; the magic that connects us to the oceans and the earth and the skies; and all therein that lies. The microcosms and macrocosms that echo each other throughout the universe; bubbling up in the gaps and flinging swathes across an inky sky - the patterns and shapes and symbols that repeat and reveal themselves, the shadows that flicker at the everchanging edges and those big visceral feels that slap you right between the eyes and remind you you’re alive - and that that happens to be a really bloody great thing to be.