Art In Mind: Christchurch Mansion ... again

We are now into our third week at the Mansion. The theme of this course is 'collections'. A collection is an accumulation of objects gathered for study, comparison or exhibition. Christchurch Mansion is set out with period rooms and covers 500 years of history from the 16th century through to the 19th century. There are many areas to inspire from kitchen utensils, paintings, ceramics, toys and costume.

We started the first session with making sketchbooks and trying to identify a collection of objects from the museum that had a personal interest. We did some word association exercises in order to pinpoint a particular colour or form that interested us and then explored the Mansion to find objects that contained or represented them. For instance, the colour blue could be narrowed down into midnight blue and any object that had a deep blue, a night sky etc became the part of the collection. A circle or sphere came to represent the sun and again any object that featured the sun in any way became a collection of 'sun objects'.

Using these collections of objects as starting points we engaged in a series of exercises looking at alternative ways of documenting them such as collage, word poems, drawing sections of the object and making patterns.

The fourth week will be spent in working up one of these initial ideas into a piece of artwork.

ALL OF THE WORK BELOW ARE PAGES FROM SKETCHBOOKS SHOWING INITIAL IDEAS: