'Developing as a Person'

workshop/performance

Reykjavik, Iceland
A performative workshop heavily influenced by self-help groups, tracing the format of a workshop in order to push forward the question- how do we understand what the 'self' is today?

Using the pedagogical guidelines from a teacher's handbook from the 1970's entitled 'Developing as a Person,' this particular session focused on self-image.

Opening the course in a classroom setting with a chalkboard for exploring and coffee and pastries for comfort, I began asking questions about what it means to have a personality or even to see one's self. The participants were very involved and offered very inquisitive and thoughtful responses. However, as I strictly followed the questions and statements from the book, the conversation became quite stale and lost. Where was I going with this? The statements were seemingly negating themselves. The room grew quiet. If how I see myself is engrained in my personality from early childhood, are we doomed? Is she serious?

Ok. Well, now that we've explored that. Let's move on to a group activity.

Moving into the print room, I placed lemons in the middle of the shared table.

Tell me about their personalities. Find ways to describe these individual lemons by using personifying words, not visual adjectives.

From that discussion, I turned on an overhead projector and placed the lemons upon the light, creating different compositions with their silhouettes.

Now the question was, How does their placement in space with other lemons change how you perceive them now?
Allowing the participants to move the lemons around and create their own compositions projects onto the walls, we looked at how their relative shapes shift our ideas.


From group discussion to individual creation;
each participant was asked to observe an individual lemon and to make a list of attributes and descriptions. These could be personifying or not.

Now, from there each participant prompted to create a form using black construction paper that didn't represent the lemon, but the was inspired directly from the list of attributes. This could be a word, an abstract form or something else that was associated.

Upon finishing our shapes, we all moved to a screenprinting screen where we proceeded to compose a collaborative pattern using each of our creations. Through discussion we decided upon the motif (which resembled the lemon silhouettes from before) and burned the image onto the screen.

For a final glimpse of shapes, silhouettes and forms being imprinted, I placed the original lemons directly on the burning table and developed an image on the screen without using a flat or transparent image, which is usually the case).

When the image was ready, each of us took turns printing the pattern and the lemon image.
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