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It will display the latest information on upcoming workshops.
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When | Wednesday 25 June, 2pm – 4pm
Where | Penryn Campus, space tbc
Description
What happens when we enter not only interdisciplinary, but interspecies collaboration?
In this practical workshop, we’ll work with the birds on Penryn campus, exploring what happens when we view them as our co-creators and -investigators.
We’ll look at a selection of work that collaborates, thinks-with, or translates birds’ song, movement and being. These will be poetic in the broadest, most expanded sense: spectrograms, bird-karaoke, calligraphic timelapse photography, and words.
Bring examples from your own work, of approaches to collaboration, visualisation, verbalising, sense-making, and invite the birds to create with you. This might be graphs, excerpts from papers, images, or just make a mindmap of these beforehand (there’ll be time to consider this in the session, too).
About your Workshop Host | Caleb Parkin is a practice-based PhD researcher in RENEW Biodiversity – his research considers human-nonhuman communication in poetry. He tutors for Poetry School, Poetry Society, Arvon, and holds an MSc Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. He was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22 and has featured in The Guardian and as guest poet on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Caleb’s debut collection This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches Press, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize and new collection, Mingle, is out in October 2024.
When | Friday 27th June, 2pm – 4pm
Where | Penryn Campus, space tbc
In his work, Tim Ingold (2003) challenges the idea that making is simply about imposing a pre-conceived design or form onto raw materials. Instead, he argues that making is a process of engagement with materials, where the maker learns and adapts through interaction with the world. Adopting a phenomenological stance, Ingold argued that meaning emerges through the act of making, not as something pre-planned or separated from it. For him, making is a form of “correspondence,” where makers and materials evolve together in a mutual process of becoming.
Following Ingold’s suggestion that making is a process of becoming more aware, we embark on a creative journey ourselves. Using natural materials – foraged and received – we will weave ‘bug hotels’ that can be placed in the natural environment. Though some techniques will be suggested, this journey is not about following a blueprint. Rather, it is about developing an intuitive and personal relationship between the self, the materials, and the surrounding environment. In this way, the workshop highlights one’s interaction with matter through making as a way of being in and with the world (Biesta, 2002). Through these meaningful interactions, we might come to understand and create meaning -and ourselves- in different and unexpected ways.
Your Host | Dr Matthew Isherwood, School of Education
