Workshop with Robert George Sanders

I had a really freeing and interesting day with Robert George Sanders at his Cast workshop. He started by disarming our normative ideas of what it is to draw, asking us to draw shapes that he had made around the room with garments. Then we moved on to collaging, and then to making three dimensional garment/outfits with waste material. It felt healthy and needed for me to step out of my usual way of working to embrace colour and artifice, and be theatrical and collaborative in making. It got me thinking about social contracts and how they invade everything from the way we interact with each other to the way that we dress or define what a garment is. 

Drawing excercises:

• Tape the pencil/pen to the end of your finger, draw with distance
• Draw close to the paper, your hand contacting the page fully
• Hold the pen to the page and allow your partner to move the paper, swap.
• Make a continuous drawing, and at Roberts command, drag the pen down or up the page at intervals, continuing the drawing from its new place. 

I want to continue some of these practices alone or in collaboration with other students, breaking up my practice "Shaking off" the rules that I have unconsciously or consciously set myself. 

In the first stage of the workshop, he asked us to label our drawings with words that were not directly descriptive of what the drawings were, but rather were intuitive responses to the action or sensation of the drawing. I loved this idea of an almost unconscious form of poetry making, disengaging from the narrative and forming a relationship with words that is haptic and sensory.