Wobbly Pots
January activities
I started writing this post back in December, and then as so often happens in December, life got busy and I didn’t get round to posting it. I wanted to come back to it now and share it as it shows a current exhibition on at The Hepworth that’s worth a share and worth visiting if you live near by. I developed a workshop and activities for families visiting to go alongside the exhibition and I thought it would be nice to share them too.
The exhibition Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto is on show for the next few months. De Waal has curated the exhibition alongside showing some of his own ceramic pieces, it shows many of Salto’s pots which look like they are somehow still growing and sprouting weird tentacles alongside a selection of his drawings, books and textiles.
There is short video of Edmund De Waal talking about his connection to Wakefield, he talks about his relationship with Bill Ismay who was a passionate collector of studio pottery through his life. He kept all his pots in his small terrace house and he is someone I think about often as I live just beside his old house and walk past it daily. I often look at the blue plaque showing he lived there and imagine a home very similar to mine full to the brim of amazing pots.
You can find the video HERE
Salto does not do straight lines. Imagine walking with him in the country. He notices things, turns back, picks up stones, draws a leaf, hums a tune, tells a story, meanders, pinches some clay into a little vessel. Stay with him.
De Waal has also written a series of texts to sit alongside the exhibition that I really love. They have a slightly notey, idea-led quality to them, more like thoughts gathered on a page than formal wall text.
As part of a series workshops I ran to go alongside the exhibition I created activities for families to explore the ceramics while in the gallery spaces. I wanted to help them create drawings that felt like they were alive and growing with a variety of textures. we used frottage to make rubbings of different textures, combined together in different colours to build up their own pot - like shapes.
The exhibition has really lovely interactive elements to it, there are large vessels that you can touch and in the final room which is a beautifully designed space there is a section called the play pavilion, this play area felt really exciting to me as its unusual in the curating of an exhibition to have a considered and quite central area for visitors to engage and create their own artworks. Children and adults can use stamps to make images and sit and read.
As part of developing the play pavilion, the learning team at The Hepworth created an area with natural forms, sensory objects and pencils alongside cards with activity prompts on them. I had a really lovely time creating the visuals to go along side these cards and photographing them.
Balancing objects, stacking them, arranging patterns, drawing around them, making rubbings from them, inventing animals and faces, drawing them in all sort of different ways.
A few more images from the exhibition.
