This year, Floating Land is focusing on providing learning experiences to local/state and national artists/designers in workshop processes with highly respected and prominent international designers and artists.
The 5-day workshops will explore the design process and employ experimental approaches that place emphasis on practice-oriented, creative work. Each participant will create an artwork exploring Floating Land’s theme and their work will be included in the Floating Land exhibition which continues until 24 June.
The workshops will be undertaken within the sculpture site and interaction between all workshop participants will be faciltiated by a number of community and festival events.
David Trubridge is an internationally recognised and respected designer, artist and curator, writer, teacher and mentor. Last year, he featured as the key industry figure for the Design Institute of Australia, Queensland chapter Awards. His design philosophy is relevant to very contemporary issues of sustainable innovation … “I work within the limits of what I have and what I know, simplicity and low impact, new material and processes, leaving a delicate footprint.
“The workshops will be based on the idea of avoiding designing something just to make it look different. That is the way of consumer fashion which requires us to buy something new each year. Instead of designing THINGS, I think we should try to reconsider the WAY WE DO things. So I ask the students, not to design a table, but eating -- to rethink the ritual of eating in the light of current social, economic, environmental etc issues. Having done this the need for new and different objects will become apparent. That gives a reason to design and produce them -- if we need them at all!
After completing postgraduate studies during her 35 years as a professional painter and sculpture, Jill Chism has turned her focus to installation art.
Having completed several major public art commissions, Jill has become passionate about art in nature and its capacity to affect understanding of critical environmental issues. She was one of the artists selected for ‘Great Walks – art and environment’.
Water, as a fundamental substance for life, is at the centre of critical focus and debate, a result of recent drought, population and industry growth and global warming/climate change. Such attention has brought focus to water as a vital resource and created various attitudes across communities from indifference, in areas exposed to high rainfall and heated debate from southern areas where water is in short supply.
In this workshop, water is the ‘material’ for exploration as the participant interacts with the water’s edge and sculpturally conceive how communities and individuals relate to and co-exist with bodies of water from more personal to more generic perspectives.
Rex Kalehoff has a BFA in Sculpture from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has made frequent trips to Australia and South East Asia for travel, teaching and research, and held his first solo exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand 2005. The exhibition featured small sculptures made whilst working in Tasmania, Australia. He is currently undertaking postgraduate study in Wood Furniture Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Rex employs natural materials, in particular wood and stone, to construct sculptural forms without the use of synthetic adhesives.
Using stone and wood as the sculptural mediums, the participant will conceptually explore the ‘artefact’ which has been ‘recovered from the environment’. Whether this ‘artefact’ is a tool, ritual object, container or personal item, the origins and reason for its existence will be developed through the design phase. Utilising carving and traditional woodworking techniques, the ‘artefact’ will then be created.
