What shapes us?

What if a portrait of a person didn’t show their appearance, but rather what shaped them? Let’s imagine a person as an abstract, soft sculpture made of fresh clay: everything they’ve touched and leaned against leaves a mark on them. What are these marks and imprints? What shapes us?

 

We’ll start by seeking inspiration in the works of the artists featured in the exhibition “Sculpture After Stability.” We’ll examine the work of Kaari Upson, who combined casts of a tree growing next to her family home with impressions of her own knees. We’ll see how Nicole Wermers and Ken Sortais transform the traces of old sculptures into something entirely new. We’ll also look through Gizela Mickiewicz’s transparent sculpture and try to decipher the imprints of specific encounters, situations, and experiences.

In the hands-on portion, we’ll create our own reliefs in which we’ll abstractly record traces of our own or someone else’s life story. We’ll press various materials and objects onto flat clay forms to create an artistic record of what we associate with a specific person.

 

A workshop ticket grants admission to the exhibition up to 2 hours before the event.

Yaroslava Holysh —MSN educator, artist, muralist. She focuses primarily on painting, including the creation of paintings incorporating augmented reality (AR). She has worked as a muralist in the advertising industry and currently creates artistic murals and leads workshops on street art. She is a member of the International Association of Art/UNESCO.