Artist talk, hands-on workshop on textile art-making and DIY fashion

With the students, faculty head and members of Hellomotion High School
Photo c/o Hellomotion HS

Hellomotion High School, Ciputat, Jawa Barat, Indonesia - Put a dedicated and passionate artist-teacher like Agnisa Wisesa and I together and out comes a packed program of art engagement activities.

For the artist talk, I focused on introducing the curious students of Hellomotion High School to socially-engaged art-making.  I discussed a few of my own works (such as works from the Wear of Needs project) as well as a few projects by Indonesian art practitioners.

This was then followed by an art exercise.  Drawing from personal reflection, the students created visual representations of the things that interested them or mattered to them most at the moment.  I challenged them to incorporate textiles into these works.  And as it turned out, working with textiles for art-making was a first for most of them.

This art exercise was also partly an experiment.  I wanted to glimpse the breadth and depth of the interests of these 15-year-olds.  I attempted to move the art-making further but listening to the students' inputs (and my gut feeling), I decided otherwise.  There may yet be more that can be done in this experiment, but that would be for another time, another day.

Through all this, Agni was there to provide additional guidance for the students.  While it was easy to convince some of the lads to hand stitch their work instead of using glue, a few initially voiced resistance but then Agni guided them to "see the light" (ha ha).

Agni had told me that Indonesians like to make puns.  I asked one of the students if he knew how to knot the sewing thread.  He replied, "I do not."  After he was shown how to do it, he grinned and said something like, "Now, I do knot!"

To cap the day's activities, we moved quickly on to create some DIY fashion works.  See here.