1525: Rights to Our City

This series of workshops for 15-25 year olds aims to explore the current exhibitions and ideas around the future of our city, through walking and art making. 

Over the series we will reimagine our city as a place for play and a stage for hidden mythologies to emerge into, giving light to the underappreciated and transforming the everyday-ness and hostile architectures into places that represent your ideas and vision. We will explore the art of walking, photography, cyanotype, screen-printing, relief printing, poetry, and drawing. You are invited to attend an individual session or all four.

In our first session, we will take a photography walk to find areas of beauty and of needed improvement, thinking of imaginative ways to transform these spaces. Using creative photography techniques, experimenting with DIY filters and textures to create original images. Following this, we will begin to write poetry and narrative world building elements, inspired by the walk and imagining possible mythologies for the places.

In our second session, we will take a walk to look for ‘volunteer plants’ (a kinder term for weeds!) We will spot, try and identify with true or imagined names and take samples of these plants. After the walk we will return with plant samples, and use these, alongside side text and images to create cyanotypes. Cyanotype, or sun prints is a photographic print process which uses light sensitive chemicals to create images.

In our third session, we will be taking a walk to search for sigils. Sigils are the name for magical symbols created to represent a particular intention, but in this exercise we will be finding existing symbols and shapes in the urban environment and assigning new meanings to them. We will then use these sigils as inspiration to create screen-prints with a paper template screen-printing method.

For our final session we will be taking a walk and trying out the techniques of walking drawing, attempting to literally walk and draw at the same time, capturing fleeting moments and speedy studies of life. We will use these walking drawings and other material created over this series as inspiration to make some postcards from a future city. Imagining how Nottingham may be different in the future, and what you would like to see here from public space. We will be using a relief printing method to create these postcards.

About

Free for all. This event is aimed at 15-25 year olds. Booking is required.

Access

The walks will be around an hour each in total, walking at an average pace through mostly urban environments around the city. This may include some steps and uneven ground as is found in parks.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing chantelle@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750

About the artist

Amelia Daiz is a socially engaged artist who works across many disciplines and is currently exploring walking as an art form. As part of this she is the founder of Meanderers, an organisation that runs regular events, focusing on using a combination of walking and creativity to improve wellbeing and build a sense of community within participants. Amelia’s work has been commissioned and exhibited locally and within Europe, and she is an active member of the Nottingham art scene.