Workshop: ALCHEMY: transform

About the event

Be inspired by your beautiful local landscape!

Come and create ceramic touch stones using local materials and earth colours from your unique geographic area of the Ashburton district.  Explore the shapes in your special braided rivers that run from the mountains to the sea and transform ceramic materials into your own set of rocks and pebbles.

During this session artists Amanda Greenfield and Tatyanna Meharry will share with you their own journey through the landscape and introduce you to new ways to experience it differently yourself.  You will use local materials, clay, textures, and paint to make a collection of 15 rocks that reflect your landscape.  Explore shape and graphic mark making in this fun and friendly session.

Once the workshop is completed your stones will be taken back to Christchurch to be transformed by firing in the heat of the kiln.  They will then contribute to a larger landscape installation for the Foyer Wall Gallery at the Ashburton Art Gallery in August. You will be able to come and spot your unique stones during the show and post show take your touchstones home with you.

No experience is needed but you may wish to bring along a few stems of a plant that grows in your garden.  This could be leaves, tussock, grass or seed heads that can provide texture when pressed into clay.

All materials included in fee.

Please bring an apron and a mask.

Artists Greenfield & Meharry are passionate about local earth materials and the way that they can be transformed as a tool to create new narratives around our physical connections to materials and surface within an arts practice.  They have undertaken an ongoing investigation of materials found around the South Island and, in particular, for this project have focused on the Ashburton district. The resulting work from this can be found exhibited in Gallery 3.