Workshop VART 3650 & 3652 Workshop 2 & 4 Semester 2 2025
Glitch & Malfunction
Glitch – interruption disturbance & malfunction
- Location 4.2.03
- Day/time Friday 1.30 – 4.30
- Teaching staff Xanthe Dobbie
What is a glitch? The glitch is a gap, failure, interruption or a ‘spanner in the works’. The glitch disrupts and in doing so poses a threat to order, becoming a radical opportunity for (as Legacy Russell argues) redirection, remix, and rebirth. This course encourages and prompts you to look for malfunction as an opportunity for creativity. You will explore this via digital tools as well as an exercise in thinking through non-digital studio methodologies and cultural gestures. A broad range of experimental techniques incorporating both digital and non-digital methods and media will be introduced in this hands-on workshop as you create and explore your own original glitch methodologies. Individual and group tutorials, discussions, lectures, demonstrations, screenings, and feedback sessions will complement this workshop.
Embrace your mistakes, celebrate accidents, and revel in the unexpected!
Sonic Materialism: Sound Recording as Studio Practice
- Location 4.2.03
- Day/time Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff Lewis Gittus
This workshop offers a practical and conceptual introduction to sound recording in the context of experimental, studio practice. In undertaking this workshop, students will be prompted to consider, in what ways might sound as an artistic medium demand alternative non-visualist modes of thinking? How might sound recording be approached as both material and method? What becomes possible when sound recording goes wrong?
Students will be introduced to a range of contemporary and historical examples, such as the tape-based works of Beatriz Ferreyra, the turntable experiments of Grand Wizzard Theodore, the expansive field recordings of Francisco López, and more recently, the extended microphone techniques of Ka Baird. Hands-on studio sessions will explore creative approaches to microphone technique, Foley recording, signal processing, and digital audio software.
Upon completion, students will have an applied understanding of basic recording and editing techniques, complemented by a range of artistic perspectives and precedents.
Abstraction: Process and Meaning
Sam Gillam, Rondo, 1971
- Location 2.4.4
- Day/time Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff Antonia Sellbach
In this workshop you will embark on a range of process based, conceptual and material investigations into Abstraction. We will explore the ways that abstract elements like colour, gesture, pattern, materiality, surface and form can reveal and inform meaning. We will investigate artistic processes and strategies that can be used to generate works, such as chance, systems, repetition, redaction, modularity, seriality, assemblage, play and rule-based methodologies. You may engage with the topic of Abstraction through the medium/s of your choosing: the expanded fields of painting, drawing, mark-making, printmaking, sculpture, collage, mixed media, installation, photography, video and sound.
Through group art-making sessions each week will bring focus to new experimental processes, themes, materials and techniques – all towards an understanding of how meaning, abstraction and process are intertwined.
Painting and Contemporary Methodologies
Darren Wardle, The Afterlife of Things (2024), oil and acrylic on canvas, 152.5cm x 244cm.
From the exhibition Painting Now 2024 at Michael Reid Sydney, AU
- Location 2.3.4
- Day/time Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff Saffron Newey
In this workshop, you will experience painting’s vital energy through a range of projects that investigate the concepts, strategies and processes used by painters to generate work. You will develop creative strategies and research methods that build proficiency in painting and lead to sustainable individual studio practice. The importance of experimentation, play and chance will be explored in the development of visual language. Diverse material practices will be engaged to explore the relationship of painting to photography, film, the internet, pop culture and the sublime.
Both abstract and figurative outcomes will focus on composition, scale, use of colour, collage, surface, texture, gesture, opacity and transparency.
You will experience a range of media and processes including oil, acrylic, watercolour, and gouache and their application on a variety of supports. This course is studio based, complemented by student presentations, demonstrations, visual lectures, individual and group tutorials and feedback in a supportive and stimulating environment.
Book as Art Object
- Location 49.2.2
- Day/time Friday 9:30am-12:30pm
- Teaching staff Hannah Caprice
The Book as Art Object Workshop has been designed to provide Fine Art students with an expanded understanding of the book as a vehicle for artistic expression within a contemporary context. In this class, you will explore the possibilities offered by the artist book for the presentation of visual information and ideas through exploring the relationship between book binding methods and content. A broad range of book binding techniques incorporating both adhesive and non-adhesive book binding methods will be introduced in this hands-on workshop, as you create your own original book-based art objects. Lectures, studio-based demonstrations, and peer-to-peer learning will help to advance notions of narrative and the page.
Photographic Screen Print
- Location 95.1.1
- Day/time Friday 1:30pm-4:30pm
- Teaching staff Andrew Clapham
This workshop will introduce you to screen printing processes and technologies that focus on photographic, and text-based printing. The objectives of the course are to provide you with the skills and knowledge to produce photographic screen prints; reflect upon the role of photographic screen printing in contemporary art; and expand the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of your art practice.
Bronze Foundry
- Location – 37.1.7
- Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff – Fleur Summers
This course is designed to introduce you to the fundamental techniques of bronze casting. Bronze casting has been used across continents for thousands of years and is now predominantly used for casting fine art objects.
In this course you will develop practical skills across a range of processes and materials, which are commonly used in sculptural practice and industry with a focus on the lost wax casting method. The course involves preparation for two bronze pours and will involve practical instruction in the use of workshop equipment alongside relevant health and safety training. Casting in bronze involves a team effort, work boots, covered clothing and safety glasses.
This course is mainly practical but with appropriate tutorial presentations covering theoretical and relevant historical background.
Please note: You cannot complete this course without regular attendance due to the processes involved.
Hybrid 2D Drawing
- Location: 4.5.05
- Day/time: Friday 9.30-12.30
- Teaching staff: TBC
In this course, you will develop skills in combining picture making, visual research and composite materials as a way of generating new knowledge and ideas for your studio practice. The two-dimensional ground is a place to play and experiment, to bring new ideas together, to translate and recombine public and personal meanings. This course provides a range of individual research strategies formed around cycles of making and principles of assemblage, collage, montage, unmaking and reworking, reflecting on the interplay of the image-as-object and medium-as-process. Objectives are to extend your skills to transform traditional mediums, to complement your emerging studio practice through individually realised projects and to develop awareness and understanding of how broad social and cultural perspectives can be reflected in contemporary art practice.
Drawing and Perception
- Location: 4.5.05
- Day/time: Friday 9.30-12.30 (class 1) 1.30-4.30 (class 2)
- Teaching staff: TBC
In this course offers you will investigate through a structured drawing program facets and techniques of drawing skills through approaches to seeing, thinking and perception. It encompasses life drawing and general drawing expanded to embrace aspects of the performed figure, spatial dynamics, mark making & trace. You will explore your personal vision, examine conventions and contexts of drawing and its capacity to communicate expressively across a range of media. You will produce a folio of resolved drawings with a support folio of studies and research material that is relevant to a range of areas of study.
Creating Narrative Through Ceramic Form and Surface
- Location: 6.02.01
- Day/time: Friday 1.30 – 4.30
- Teaching staff: TBC
This course is an explorative approach to hand forming clay. Investigating influences and techniques, you will explore non-conventional sculptural methods to manipulate and develop form and surface qualities. Projects will encourage material experimentation with a focus on practice and enquiry.
Plaster Moulds and Ceramic Hybrid Forms
- Location: 4.01.01
- Day/time: Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff: Jennifer Conroy-Smith
This workshop will explore techniques and processes that combine elements of plaster mould-making and hand forming, to make hybrid sculptural forms. Through a series of projects and investigations, you will engage with alternative techniques and processes, using plaster, clay, texture and colour. Exploring slip casting with liquid clay, combined with press moulding, sculpting and surface treatments, creating work that explores a fusion of techniques.
Enameling and Colour for Metal
KATHERINE HUBBLE, JEWEL BEETLE 2014
- Location: 2.1.03
- Day/time: Friday 1.30 – 4.30
- Teaching staff: Kirsten Hayden
In this workshop, students will focus on the concepts of applying colour to metal. This course is for all fine art students and looks at exploring how heat and metal can be utilised to create new enamel surfaces in fine art. Vitreous enamel are created using heat to fuse glass on metal and this outcome can provide jewel-like qualities and lustrous and layered colours and patterns over copper, silver and steel. Students will design and apply their own personal iconography to metal and enamel. Students will explore how to translate their ideas and drawings using vitreous enamels materials with processes such as stenciling, sifting, drawing, painting, foiling and graffito.
Casting and Metal Alloying
- Location: 2.1.03
- Day/time: Friday 9.30 – 12.30
- Teaching staff: Katherine Bowman
In this course, you will explore the physical properties of various metals and processes used in small-scale casting. Processes covered will include lost wax, mould making for multiples and metal alloying. There is a considered focus on creating original models from a wide range of wax processes. You will also experiment with creating metal alloys and understand how these alloys give colour.
Soft Sculpture
Tricia Page ‘Pimp My Ride’
- Location: 37.01.07
- Day/time: Friday 1.30 – 4.30
- Teaching staff: TBC
This course focuses on the possibilities of making soft sculpture within a contemporary art framework. Students will undertake a series of short workshops which introduce a variety of conceptual and technical skills including basic pattern making, working with scale, hand and machine sewing, armature construction and the use of readymades. These skills will be contextualized by the works of a range of artists. Students will develop their own works using a range of pliable materials and are expected to develop new experimental approaches and definitions in the production of soft sculpture.