This Art Workshop series is designed and run in collaboration with artists from Bath/ Somerset. Sessions will take place in various locations in the city of Bath including 44AD artspace and the BRLSI’s Lonsdale Room as well as some outdoor venues. All workshops draw on participants’ plant-based knowledges and imagination. Artist-lead sessions will explore the representation of plants in Western and non-Western art and the participants’ botanical imagination. The sessions will result in a collective exhibition in September-October 2023 at the 44AD Artspace
Saturday 26 November 2022 14.00-17.00 pm @ 44AD Artspace Basement Studio
Exploring Colonialism through Plant Motifs. Creative Workshop with Simbah Pilé
Sugar (cane), cotton and tobacco are the plants most associated with the colonial period. However, it is lesser known that the entire colonial enterprise was fuelled by a wider and more in-depth botanical rush, which resulted in many of the ‘decorative’, medicinal, and staple food plants used in the United Kingdom today. In this workshop we will endeavour to engage creatively through the method of collage and mixed media, with the complicated history of the European botanical rush and colonisation of other countries and people and how it is still present and silently interacting with our day to day lives. We will utilise plant motifs some of which will be previously collected / gathered from around the city of Bath, others will be of commonly overlooked house and garden plants that were introduced to this country by colonial botanist.
Simbah Pilé isa contemporary Barbadian artist living and working in the UK. She graduated from Barbados Community College with a Fine Art Degree in 2009 and she curated her first exhibition in 2011 focusing on Contemporary Illustrations in Barbados. Later that year she represented the Caribbean and in the Wasanii International Artist Workshop “In Conversation”. Her work includes painting, murals, watercolour, collages, drawing, mixed media, printmaking, video, illustrations, paperworks and digital art. She exhibited in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean.
To book this event:
Tuesday 6th December 2022 at 44 AD 17.00-20.00
Plants and people: between uncertainty and resilience. Creative workshop with Lucia Harley
In this workshop, Lucia Harley will draw on her talk ‘Plants and people: between uncertainty and resilience’ delivered on 5th December 2022 at the BRLSI and her project completed in May 2022 in Northeast Brazil where she explored as an artist researcher the botanical work of both her father, a British botanist who specialises in the flora of Brazil, and her stepmother, a Brazilian botanist. She walked a series of botanical trails published by her parents within the Chapada Diamantina, engaged with local community, and collaborated and responded through art. The workshop will use mix media. It will celebrate the overlooked, undervalued and the determination of both plants and people.
Lucia Harley is a freelance artist educator who works with objects, live actions, drawing and film. She has devised and delivered creative workshops including schools and community workshops and curated events for various organisations. Her work as an art educator includes the Holburne Museum’s Pathways to Wellbeing for which she created downloadable trails and live zoom sessions, the Parks for People project with Sydney Gardens Bath, and the ‘All weather art club’ for young people with disability at Hestercombe House Taunton. She has also worked as a creative facilitator for Alive, a charity based in Bristol, engaging activity with older people and people with dementia, including intergenerational sessions and as an education coordinator for Casting the World community heritage lottery funded project.
To book this event:
Saturday 11th February 15.00-17.00 @ BRLSI, Lonsdale Room
Rice, Women, Resistance
This mixed-media workshop, led by Lucia Harley, draws on a talk by Nicholaas Pinas which reflects on biodiversity and colonial resistance in maroon communities in Suriname and French Guiana. It will focus on rice, a keystone crop in all Maroon communities and one of the reasons which made marronage successful. Participants will look at little known African rice varieties named after female growers and fugitives. They will use creativity to explore the significations of plants and their connections with people who were transplanted form their original contexts through colonialism. The interconnected stories of plants and people will be represented through drawing and collaging. The workshop is suited to all audiences from the age of 12.
Nicholaas Pinas is a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research Netherlands and a descendant of Maroons in Suriname. His research interests include ethnobotany, traditional rice farming, Maroons in Suriname and French Guyana.
Lucia Harley is a freelance artist educator who works with objects, live actions, drawing and film. She has devised and delivered creative workshops including schools and community workshops and curated events for various organisations.
To book this event:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rice-women-resistance-creative-workshop-tickets-462024817667
April 2023 (Date TBC)
Decolonize your botanical imagination. A streetart workshop by Benjamin Van Praag.
This workshop participants will explore the links with botany and colonisation, and the complex relationship that we now have with plants and their products. The workshop will attempt to support you in decolonizing your botanical imagination, providing you with the chance to have a deeper understanding of the effects of colonisation. By participating in this workshop, you will have the opportunity to experiment with some of the typical techniques and styles employed by street artists and graffiti writers. These techniques will include the use of spray paint, acrylic ink, masking, and stencilling, and mark making to create unique botanical artworks. The artworks will be created on paper which you will be able to take home and enjoy. A street art will be realised collectively by the participants drawing on their individual and co-created designs.
Benjamin Van Praagis a graffiti writer based in Bristol and a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Bath. Since 2018, he has been experimenting with Co-Creation strategies using graffiti painting and other art forms in Brazil, Mexico, France and Bath involving communities and young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
To book this event: TBC
Friday 5th May 2023 14.00-17.00 @ Bath Botanical Garden
“Exotic” vs. Familiar. A drawing walk and picnic at the Bath Botanical Garden with Dr Christina Horvath
This drawing walk will take you for a botanical pick-nick at the Bath Botanical Garden. Bath is an aesthetically compelling Georgian spa town where beautiful pleasure gardens have been designed to create a wholesome environment and a space for social life and entertainment to be enjoyed by wealthy visitors. Surely, tropical plants have a great deal in this story. What stories do they tell? How did they arrive to Bath? This botanising walk across will take you to Bath’s botanical garden to set the perfect scene to visualise of the influence of colonial plant exchanghe on garden design and contemporary garden aesthetic in Bath.
To book this event: TBC
Workshop 6
This open-air drawing workshop, by Katie O’ Brien and Maidei Kambarami will reflect on land, food growing and edible plants. It will take inspiration from Bath’s allotment gardens and will dwell into seasonal plants in Bath’s gardens (and in particular Katie’s allotment garden.
Katie O’ Brien is the founder of 44AD artspace. Curator, abstract artist and arts educator with a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University, she is an experienced project director with a long experience of working in the fine art industry.
Maidei Kambarami is a Fine Art graduate from Bath Spa University.