Nomadic Creative Path

Botanics of the Wanderer explores how plants can show us a landscape in a different way, using monotype, wash and printmaking techniques.

Taking a walk allows for a break from life’s turmoil, letting objects be transferred to a space where an aesthetic experience of the landscape is made possible, allowing for its artistic materialization.

Since the beginning of civilization, landscape and Humanity’s defining nomadism have existed and inspired the individual. As Francesco Careri put it: “Through the act of walking Humanity started building the natural landscape that surrounded it. Walking can become an aesthetic tool that reads and writes the landscape as a perceptive and creative act”.

On that basis, this workshop proposes another way of living and considering the landscape of the path. We will be observing the environment as we walk, briefly stopping for a more thorough examination. Students in the mid to upper cycle of elementary school will bring sketchbooks to capture images through drawings or prints (using painting techniques similar to scientific fieldnotes’).

Groups of up to -20-25 students.

Objectives:

• Auditory observation where blindfolded children have to listen silently to the sounds of Nature. Each child must describe what they hear and perform what they hear with movement, using their body or on paper.
• Perceiving shapes and textures to make a mosaic representing movement, using plants and sticks: observation + stimulus + reflection = creation. Such a process is used by many an artist.

• The main goal is to ensure children adopt a respectful approach to their surroundings and become aware of being an active part in Nature, both as its guardians and as artists.

Dynamic: individual workshop

In this workshop, students will create field notes, partially during the walk and the rest at the studio. We’ll pick up objects, plants, logs and stones we find interesting to work with in the study with creative techniques.

Intervening the landscape with a stone installation, mirroring a Richard Long work. Children will leave in the forest an object of their choosing, as a token of their stay…

“A sign, perhaps the indication of a path, perhaps like the stones left during a journey by the pure necessity of finding the way back. Richard Long”. Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking.

Dynamic: group workshop

Intervening the landscape with a stone installation, mirroring a Richard Long work. Children will leave in the forest an object of their choosing, as a token of their stay…

“A sign, perhaps the indication of a path, perhaps like the stones left during a journey by the pure necessity of finding the way back. Richard Long”. Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking.