College One: Monday 15th April Workshop Tasks...

Task One

For Task One, we was all put into pairs and in that pair, one of us had to begin to draw a line and the other one had to continue it. I continued the line, during this task we was not allowed to speak or communicate, each of us was adding to each other's marks made. This showed variation in how we both draw and how we interpreted each other's mark. The person I was paired with came from a digital background where as my work is Textiles, his marks held a graphic element to them, whereas my marks became pattern-based.

Task Two

For Task Two we had to change partners. One had 30 seconds to begin drawing, anything, then the other person would have to challenge that person's drawing by deconstructing it and drawing over it. We then changed roles, I became the destructive and I enjoyed playing this part. I thought it as my turn to get my revenge, I even chose a thicker more dominant media that faded out the other person's work. This task was used to demonstrate the idea that there is going to be more dominant people in group work and when challenged (attacked) what would we do? What would I do? Children that I will be working with may not want to participate in the workshops I produce for many reasons but it is how I control the situation that matters. Would I have back-up options, ask them to leave, ignore that student and focus on the ones that are interested or encourage them to get involved? There will always be people in the group that have different skills, I would like to encourage these somehow.

Task Three

This task was to create a dot to dot using only 50 dots. Seems simple enough... I was surprised by how difficult I found it and others did. I found it hard to number up the dots in a particular order so that the shape was clearly made. We had to swap over the dot to dots and mine did not look how it was expected to, the numbers must not have flowed correctly. This was a quick activity, I would find this task a useful one in quieting the students down or keeping them busy whilst preparing another workshop. I would do the dot to dots myself and have a selection of them so the child could pick. It is not a serious activity.

Task Four

In groups, we were given a generic theme of either a house or tree to that we had to focus our collage. Using limited resources provided my group began. My team seemed less than enthusiastic when coming up with ideas so the start was slow. We each had to represent ourselves somehow through this collage, I  represented myself through creating a tree with materials to convey my Textiles background. We had to work on an a1 piece of paper, it may seem big enough but there was not much room for each of us to be working on it at the same time. Even though we was mean't to be working together, everyone in the group got on with their own thing. Communication was lacked and the result looked fairly childish, it could be said that secondary aged children produced this.

All of these tasks challenged the ways of working in time-scales, limited resources and most importantly a working relationship.