With Ana Flores and special guests Peter Randall Page and Susan Derges
This course is open for bookings.
The practice of ecological art offers us tools, whether we are change agents, creative leaders or artists, to re-establish a sense of wholeness within our fragmented landscapes.
Join us for this dynamic week, combining art history and earth history, studio practice and field work, in which you will find new ways to respond to our ever-changing relationship with nature. Artists who have found their creative master in the natural world will serve as our models, from Leonardo Da Vinci to John James Audubon, to contemporary ecological artists such as Patricia Johanson and Andrew Goldsworthy.
The week will also feature visits from two award winning visual artists whose works are deeply rooted in the ecology of Devon: Peter Randall-Page and Susan Derges. The perspectives of these artists will inspire the processes we explore in the daily studio and field work. We will ground ourselves first with drawing, then explore three dimensions and time based work outdoors, fluidly moving between individual and collaborative exercises.
The week will conclude with a field trip to Dartmoor Arts, an intensive one week pop up art school in rural Devon.
Students with no art background are welcomed and encouraged.
Contributors
Ana Flores
Ana Flores is a sculptor and Ecological designer. Her sculptural and design work of the last two decades has been devoted to cultural narratives that help communities reconnect with their landscapes. Her sculptural work has been shown internationally and her outdoor installations and park designs have won many awards. Her project “Poetry of the Wild†has been travelling to communities throughout the U.S. for a decade, sparking inspired community engagement with land and art. Flores has also been an invited educator and artist in residence for many years at diverse institutions including Rhode Island School Design and Bryant University. At Rhode Island School of Design she was the co creator of Art as A Source of Healing, an award winning course with a practicum in community, engaging students in healthcare environments.
Flores was also the first artist in residence for the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and recipient of the National TogetherGreen Fellowship for her work in ecology and the arts. She is the principal of Earth Inform Studio and most recently her work entitled Poetry of the Wild was featured in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Peter Randall-Page
Peter studied sculpture at Bath Academy of Art from 1973-1977. During the past 25 years he has gained an international reputation through his sculpture drawings and prints. He has undertaken numerous large-scale commissions and exhibited widely. His work is held in public and private collections throughout the world including Japan, South Korea, Australia, , Turkey, Eire, Germany and the Netherlands. A selection of his public sculptures can be found in many urban and rural locations throughout the UK including London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge and his work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery and the British Museum amongst others.
His practice has always been informed and inspired by the study natural phenomena and its subjective impact on our emotions.
In recent years his work has become increasingly concerned with the underlying principles determining growth and the forms it produces. In his words “geometry is the theme on which nature plays her infinite variations, and can be seen as a kind of pattern book on which the most complex and sophisticated structures are based.â€
He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth in 1999, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from York St John University in 2009, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Exeter University in 2010, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bath Spa University in 2013.
As a member of the design team for the Education Resource Centre (The Core) at the Eden Project in Cornwall, Peter influenced the overall design of the building incorporating an enormous granite sculpture (‘Seed’) at its heart. Visitwww.peterrandall-page.com
Susan Derges
Susan Derges, is a photographic artist, specialising in camera-less photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes. Much of her work revolves around the creation of visual metaphors exploring the relationship between the self and nature.
She endeavours to capture both visible and invisible scientific and natural processes – the physical appearance of sound, the evolution of frog-spawn or the reflection of the moon and stars on water. She is best known for her pioneering technique of capturing the movement of water by immersing photographic paper directly into rivers or shorelines. Recently she has begun working in the studio combining analogue and digital techniques to create new forms and perspectives hitherto impossible to capture. Her practice reflects the work of the earliest pioneers of photography but is also contemporary in its experimentation and awareness of both conceptual and environmental issues.
Susan’s work is in the collection of museums around the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Hara Art Museum, Tokyo. Visit www.susanderges.com/
Course Fees
£620
Course fees include accommodation, food, field trips, materials and all teaching sessions.
If this course is booked with The Art of Invitation (4 – 8 August), a 10% discount will be applied to the combined fee.
Bursaries are also available for this course, please click here for further information
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
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Reserve your place now
To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1803 865934
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
From Pu Ling Lai
The purpose of the ecoSelf project is for people to find a sense of ecological identity and based on that to live in ecological balance. In order to find this ecological identity, people have to face the fact that humankind is part of the Earth’s wider ecology, thus stands in constant interdependence with nature. This knowledge can contribute to personal healing because the individual can be healed as part of the larger body of the Earth. Since wild nature seems to provide a powerful context for processes of ecological Self realisation, David Key uses it as a basis for his courses and projects. He provides professional development courses to help people learn how to facilitate ecological Self realisation programmes.
