The inaugural workshop brought to you by OxArch, 3rd November 2022
Owing to the visitation of some of our dedicated Oxarch committees to this wonderful artist’s exhibition in Cambridge in the past and his goodwill to tirelessly conduct the workshop for us did we have such an artsy, unexpected and amazing evening. Despite Joshua’s reverend qualifications and careers, he was extremely humble, down-to-earth and passionate as he demonstrated how we could produce mobile, sculptural artwork through the simplest things imaginable—a few A4 black and white papers, nylon thread, a bit of good old masking tape and most importantly, a light-bulb moment of inspiration obtained through some carefree tinkering!
1.Capturing the Moments- Joshua demonstrating his own iteration of suspended sculpture, and how we could make a collage by observing its rotation, light and shadows (OxArch, 2022).
2.On the Dark Side- collaging personalised, changing shadows (OxArch, 2022).
3.A Kaleidoscope of sculptures and collages, united in black and white (OxArch, 2022).
Every participant (including some OxArch committee members) gave this a go and we had such a dynamic range of artworks with a cornucopia of sizes, styles, approaches and et cetera, except that they are all in an obedient black and white colour scheme, which somewhat recalled those black and white TVs dominating the 1950s spectacles. We all sat around a cluster of tables configured in a U-shape as Joshua walked around agitatedly whilst giving us guidance, advice, suggestions and loads of positive comments. For whatever reason that I still can’t explain, spending time crafting, sketching with oil pastel and ‘messing around’ was extremely therapeutic for all of us away from our increasingly pressurised studio workloads.
I could tell that everyone was completely absorbed in crafting, drawing and interacting to an extend that Joshua had to usher us to print out our names from his nifty, tiny label printer before pinning up our drawings (trust me, it’s nothing like those traumatic crits) and display our models before the workshop drew to an end. Joshua was really proud of our masterpieces, something that he remarked as the superpowers of architecture students. Don’t sneer, you really have to take a look as they are almost as good as, if not more artistic than what we have seen in a typical, dull studio. Hopefully we will be having another workshop as fun as this one in the near future.