First drop in workshop at Quadram.
I had rather a lot of aims for this four hour session.
I wanted to
- raise my profile, let people know of the existance of their first artist in residence
- find scientists who would like to work with me
-
see how the scientists responded to creative activities
- create visual material
- learn about the research and find out what people would like to communicate with the public
- find out who had film footage that could be shown at Norwich Science Festival (NSF)
-
find out who has data in circular format
I booked three artists to assist me, in case it got busy.
Activities on offer
Make a felt microbe – artist Rach Anstey-Sanders ran with this idea of mine and did a great job with her tea strainers and buckets of warm water.
Doodle your favourite gut interaction on a template that I had prepared earlier.
Develop this into a shadow theatre scene,
run by myself or drama practitioner Hilary Thomson.
Bring circular prints to put up on the wall.
How it went
As I am not physically resident in the building, the comms team is understaffed and the business of moving to the new building has been so all
consuming, not many of the 300 scientists knew that they had an artist in residence. Publicity was a problem for this session, although we were able to slide back a whole glass wall to make ourselves visible, we needed a sandwich board outside the room, as not everyone had read the e-mails. I set up a sceen to show some of my previous art/science films but it was too
light and the screen just served to hide what we were doing. So we took it down.
Slow start getting busier, quite festive by lunchtime with groups chatting over felt making, shadow theatre happening on and I made good contacts.
I ended up filling in the templates while scientists chatted. Now making follow up meetings with some of the staff I met on the day. Great feedback.
Thanks to Mandy Hoffman, Hilary Thomson Rach Ansty-Sanders and Andrew Chappel.