PHOENIX CRITICAL CREATIVITY WORKSHOPS
1: April 5th, 2: May 22nd, 3: July 6th, 4: October 18th, 2007
Phoenix will be hosting a series of four one-day workshops during 2007 in association with The Critical Incident (www.thecriticalincident.com)
The workshops give a unique opportunity to explore different aspects of the creative process. For individuals, business and organisational leaders looking to stimulate genuine creativity and innovation, these sessions are ideal. They will be challenging, stimulating, very difficult, and practical.
Each session leader takes an arts-led look at the creative process. Each session will be very different but connected by a narrative thread exploring the question "What is creativity fundamentally about?"
Ideal for individuals working either alone or in an organisation or business, there'll be a chance to explore the creative process of four different artists, to reflect and explore your own creative urges, experiences, failures and successes.
These are not self-help workshops, they are not training sessions, they are challenging practical conversations about artistry, innovation, new ideas, expressing creative urges, insights and imaginations.
We hope to encourage participants from very different backgrounds and orientations in these exploratory one-day events.
“The workshops give a unique opportunity to explore different aspects of the creative process.”
“For individuals, business and organisational leaders looking to stimulate genuine creativity and innovation, these sessions are ideal. “
“They will be challenging, stimulating, very difficult, and practical.”
WORKSHOP 1
Thursday April 5th 10.30am – 4.30pm £50 / £35 concs
In this workshop you can forage in the world of artist Jane Fox, where one plus one makes three, conversations lead to artefacts and memories appear on carpets as she hoovers. Work with some of her strategies for embarking on creative journeys, following hunches and surprising yourself.
Jane Fox
Jane Fox lives and works in Brighton. She grew up in Hertfordshire at a time when there was an exciting DIY scene: clothes, haircuts, fanzines and bands all emerged from bedrooms and sheds to create a vibrant youth culture. She moved to Brighton in 1982 to do a degree in visual art and sound.
Since then Jane has developed an arts practice that embraces a wide range of mixed media and inter-connected activities including artist led projects, collaborations and solo work.
She has worked extensively to develop a practice that is driven by the need to break down barriers and access that which is to be celebrated in life. This has led her through self-taught musicianship, fish slapping festivals, celebratory cake making, midnight processions, experiments with salt and crushed coal, non-sense hymns, drawing from memory, night walks in a Finish forest and much more…
In 2003 Jane spent a year in Cornwall developing her work on the Contemporary Visual Art M.A. at Falmouth College of Arts.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Voyager’, Abbeville, France, ‘Transition 4’ at The Newlyn Gallery, Penzance, and ‘Underground’ Maze group show at the Argus Basement in Brighton. In February 2006 Jane’s moving image work ‘saltdances 1’ was selected for the ‘700is Reindeerland’ video festival and short-listed for the Alcoa prize.
WORKSHOP 2
Tuesday May 22nd 10.30am – 4.30pm £50 / £35 concs
Greg Daville
City Running was an art project organised I last year that ran throughout the Brighton Festival. It was awarded the Brighton Festival Award for Innovation.
It required artists of different disciplines to make spontaneous work within a few hours and exhibit it immediately.
For a detailed look at what City Running is about please visit: www.gregdaville.com
One of the questions it brought up was ‘what makes a good piece of art?’ A painter might spend months on a single painting; its value can be measured according to this process of refinement. But ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a toilet, and announced that found objects can be seen as art, the crafting of the work is not necessarily seen as the most important thing anymore. Similarly punk was about anyone and everyone making music regardless of their musical abilities.
So, regardless of your creative abilities, you are welcome to this project.
You will be asked to undertake a ‘City Run’ which requires spending some time in and around the Brighton, collecting materials, (this can be finding objects, making sketches, recording noises, or whatever is relevant to your creative area), which you will bring back to Phoenix studios. You will then have a few hours to complete your piece of work; again this can be visual, aural, written etc. The emphasis will be on experimentation rather than making a beautifully refined piece of ‘finished’ work.
We will have a small exhibition ‘opening’ in which Greg will guide a discussion around the process’ each of you have been through.
You do not need to have made anything creative before. This workshop is not about learning a new craft, but learning about creativity in its abstract sense. It is not a competition, but a time and space in which to experiment without being judged. Apart from the day itself the reward will hopefully come about from the discussions at the end of the day.
WORKSHOP 3
Friday July 6th, 10am – 4pm £50/£35 concs
 How can you make something from nothing? Anna and Frank from the Institute of Unnecessary Research take you on a journey into the void to investigate the origins of the creative impulse. How do ideas happen? What does brainstorming do? How do collaborations form? What does philosophy have to say about it all? And what are the practical implications that can benefit us all.
Anna Dumitriu
Anna Dumitriu’s highly experimental work employs digital media, live art performance, installation and intervention to express notions about the nature of research, the field of microbiology and in particular the role of the artist within scientific research. She is strongly involved with the philosophical implications of the relationship between Art and Science and this led her to create the performance art work The Institute of Unnecessary Research. Her work has been exhibited internationally including New York, LA, Tokyo, Paris and Russia and is held in international public collections including the Science Museum, London. She is currently Artist in Residence at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University and researching her PhD at The University of Brighton. Anna’s BLOG - the self-organising artist here.
Frank Jay
Frank Jay studied at St Martins School of Art and was a former Marketing Executive in London, helping launch Sony PlayStation and the Congestion Charge. He is a trained personal development leader and instigated a Bill through Parliament to legalize busking on London's Underground. He is now a partner in New Era Associates, owners of many festivals, the Sussex Farmers Market of the Year in Hove and Director of the Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival. 3 years ago he formed a company called Polishing Diamonds that makes dreams to come true and is currently writing a book and preparing a radio show on the subject. Frank met Anna when he attended a conference she was speaking at and they worked together on the production of a major performance art event. Famous for his creative ideas, he specialises in free creative thinking from a place 'nothing'.
WORKSHOP 4
Thursday October 18th 10.30am – 4.30pm £50 / £35 concs
What a Load of Rubbish?
Printed and found materials have long been a focus of art and media attention from Picasso collages to Warhol drawings, from Jake Tilson tapes to Benjamin Pell’s looted dustbins, inviting us to look at the world around us with fresh eyes. Yet the minutae of our own everyday lives we take for granted, discard or bypass without even seeing.
Reveal unnoticed juxtapositions and beliefs. Manipulate and analyse the rubbish in your life and question your perceptions in this workshop. Reassess the apparent insignificant details of your unexamined days with your own bag of rubbish.
Jayne Wilson
Responding primarily to specific sites, Jayne Wilson’s work looks to the everyday, with its unexpected rituals and juxtapositions to question our perception of people and places. Collections of sounds and words from conversations to found ephemera are introduced alongside each other to create a palimpsest of ideas which have predominantly explored social and racial stereotypes.
www.fulltable.com/wilson/MENU.htm
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AN INTRODUCTION TO VIDEO ANIMATION with Martin Smith
Martin Smith is a local film-maker who has worked on local and international commissions. An experienced tutor, he has been working for the last four years with adults and young people to create low budget films, and has worked on a series of award winning short films.
