Banff March 17

We are now into our 3rd week here in The Banff Centre. On Sunday, Vickie Newington, the 7th member of Articulation to arrive, brought Martha Cole with her. Martha is a successful, established artist who we asked to join us for the week to work with us to get ourselves as individual artists and our group to the next level in our development.

Donna Clement, Ingrid Lincoln, Martha Cole

Vickie Newington

We have been working on exercises focusing on becoming aware of our strengths these past 2 days. We rented another studio space in Glyde Hall for the 4 days of the workshop. We have each covered a section of the walls with our work and a diagram of our interests and strengths which we continue to add to and rearrange as items emerge from the exercises.

This is what my part of the walls looked like 1st thing this morning. I have since added to my strengths & interest diagram and taken the bottom right work off the wall because it doesn't reflect the characteristics of my style.

This evening I have an individual critique with Martha, which I am very much looking forward to.

Banff March 13

Flossie Peitsch from Sydney, Australia, began her self-directed residency in The Centre this week. We invited her to visit us in the woods. We had lots of fabric we could give her to get her started on her project.

She generously gave us her time to listen to each of us talk about our work and offered feedback to help us along in the work's development.

As a group we have decided we are ready to learn how to self critique and our work needs to be critiqued by others outside the group who are qualified. So Flossie's arrival is timely.

Censoring the Body

While doing research for a term paper I read a great essay by the art critic and historian, Edward Lucie-Smith. He is someone with the ability to look over history and pull out key ideas, trends and shifts in ways of thinking.
He begins his essay with the observation, "from the earliest times, humans have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way" and he continues to bring his observations of censorship of the body up until the present day. He raises lots of provocative ideas.