August 23-25, 2024
Poetic Whispers: Installations in Nature
$350. plus accommodation if required ($175)
The remote farm setting at Shibagau Creek Forest offers a unique backdrop for exploring nature through art and photography. The structure of this workshop will encourage participants to engage deeply with nature and their own artistic processes, reflecting on the transient beauty of natural art and how it can be captured and conveyed through photography.
Work with Walter Bergmoser and Peter Sramek, photographic artists and educators to expand your creative approaches and share insights together.
An introduction to the concept of art and interventions in nature will lead to discussion of how interventions can be made in nature responsibly and meaningfully, emphasizing the impermanence of some artists’ works and how to document these changes through photography.
Field Exploration around the farm will identify sites and gather natural materials that can be used in an art installation. Discussions will develop how these materials can be used to interact with the landscape, while simple experiments will be made with photographic materials utilizing alternative printing such as luminogram and cyanotype processes.
Participants will sketch their ideas and plan their installations, receiving feedback from peers and instructors. They will then select sites and construct their installations and/or natural art objects to then be documented in place with photography. Works made with natural materials will mostly be ephemeral and go back-to-nature, but then live on in the photographs which participants make.
Complex photographic experience, technique and equipment are not required for this workshop. Those interested in developing their relationship with the natural environment are invited to arrive with a cellphone (and appropriate outdoor wear).
Walter Bergmoser is an art photographer, designer and professor at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences in Berlin. As a partner in the International Art Collaborations Network, he has also been an exchange professor at OCAD University in Toronto. This will be his second year at SCFF collaborating in a photography workshop with Peter Sramek.
Peter Sramek is a photographic artist and professor emeritus at OCAD University in Toronto now living in South Frontenac. His recent exhbition at the Tett Centre in Kingston was titled The Abstraction is Not the Reality.
Participants will arrive on Friday afternoon or evening and may stay an extra night on Sunday to make a long weekend should they desire.
Cost: $525 includes tuition, accommodation and meals;
$350 for those who do not require accommodation and breakfasts.
A deposit of $60 will hold your place with full payment due 2 weeks prior to the workshop. A non-refundable fee of $60 will apply if you cancel less than 2 weeks prior.
Ride sharing can be coordinated where possible. Pick-up and drop-off in Napanee is also possible should one wish to take the bus or the train.
