Make It Move! Mini Sculptures Workshop with Visiting Artist Dawn Stetzel **Registration Required!**
Make It Move! Mini Sculptures Workshop
with Visiting Artist Dawn Stetzel
Join us for a “Motive Power Make-And-Take” with September In Situ Polyculture Artist-In-Residence, Dawn Stetzel. Make a motive power mechanism, an interactive sculptural piece to take home using a cork as a base (or battery and magnet), wire and drawing elements.
Explore simple mechanical engineering using art, science, and tinkering, and see low-tech energy experiments on display. Leave with a miniature piece that activates a tiny object, shape or visual element.
Tool use includes: tiny hand saw, wire clippers and sharp ice pick to poke holes. All supplies provided. Workshop geared for adults 16+— kids 11 and up may be accompanied by an adult. Free and open to the public.
Please register by emailing request@putneylibrary.org . Please add the ages of anyone under the age of 18 who will be joining you in your email 🙂
I make sculptural objects, contraptions that interact with a specific environment. These environments are usually in the margins of places, feeling somehow desolate, vast, or lonely due to forms of neglect or absence. These are places I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they feel somewhat like home to me.
Within this environment I use my sculpture as a tool, or mode of locomotion in which to navigate the landscape. Manually operated, these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row or ski and push the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. This process places my work between sculpture and performance.
My sculptures embrace the aesthetics of resourcefulness, repairing, adaptability and invention. I prefer a low-tech approach and glean materials from my surroundings. I select all materials for their inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within each sculpture. This process of collecting materials puts me in the edges of places, a process I need to connect me to my emotions, the specifics of place and a non-threatening bridge of connection to other people through their discards.
https://www.dawnstetzel.com