PAST WORKSHOPS

POEMS & PLANTS
Creating Pages for A Personal Book of Hours Through Drawing, Making & Reflecting.

A Summer School with Artist, Brigid Collins

This course will be delivered online 

Monday 5th – Friday 9th July 2021

Course Fee: £280*

Includes exclusive access to inspiring online tutorial videos and hand-outs, with both group and 1:1 tutorials but also plenty of opportunity for independent working. Not including materials – a recommended list will be provided in advance.

(* Deposit on booking: £50. It may be possible to pay in instalments, please ask)

A Book of Hours forms a bridge between the things of the spirit and the things of the world.

– The Sunday Times (2008)

A Book of Hours was functional prayer book made for the un-ordained and used throughout the medieval era not only to foster devotion but also, to inspire reflection. By offering opportunity for regular moments of pause, the paintings and writings within the pages of these books assisted their owners in attuning to the seasons through the cycles of a day, a week, a year, through a beautiful and personally meaningful intermingling of words and images. Little to do with a clock, the timing of their use was determined by drawing one’s attention to the rhythms of life as reflected in nature, through the setting and rising of the sun and by fostering one’s attunement to the particular patterns of the natural world in general and of plants in particular. Poet John Bennett, writes: “it’s plants that can mend the earth”, each reading of them and the poems they inspire, or are inspired by them doubling as spaces and acts of healing. Taking inspiration from medieval Books of Hours, alongside contemporary artworks such as pages from the Plant Memory series by Victoria Crowe (see below) you will be provided with resources to assist you in gaining confidence in exploring ways in which the tone, shape and language of a poem have the potential to become inspiration for ways in which you pay heed to and go on to make drawn, painted and simple sculptural responses to the form and characteristics of particular plants that you observe in the plant world, uncovering connections between these and spheres of mind and spirit that hold personal meaning for you. Throughout this course, you will be encouraged to work intuitively, whilst being sensitively guided in selecting plants – familiar and unfamiliar, living and pressed – poems and other texts, art materials and techniques (including graphite, charcoal, ink, mono-print, mixed-media, collage and wire) with a view to creating a series of personal ‘pages’ – that may take the form of drawings, paintings, sculptures – of what will become a unique, highly personal and evolving book form.