Raw Material: Stitching Session with Pamela Whitaker
April 27, 2022 4:00 pm - 5:30 pmBook your free in-person tickets here.
We are delighted to be hosting Dr Pamela Whitaker, Lecturer in Art Psychotherapy at Belfast School of Art, for a guided sewing session on using needle and thread to explore our personalised stitches. This will be an opportunity to create an artwork in response to the exhibition What Lies Beneath: Women, Politics, Textiles.
In this workshop, we will thread our way into the fabric of our lives, using sewing for embellishment, repair and piecing together what matters. We will discover our own way of sewing, as a form of making with what we have at hand. This will not be a taught workshop, but an open space to experiment.
Pamela will weave some art therapy and its textiles associations into the introduction to the workshop and its themes, so that this information seamlessly integrates with the session.
We will work with our clothing and with cloth found around the home to decorate, patch and celebrate how cloth becomes us. Expressive stitching is a free form of improvised sewing to adorn life materials that we wear or use at home.
Materials:
Participants will need to bring:
A piece of cloth or cloth-based object
Your preferred sewing equipment (we will provide a limited amount of materials, so if you have your own that you are able to bring, please do!)
We will provide:
Scissors
Needles
Thread
About Pamela Whitaker
Dr Pamela Whitaker is a Lecturer in Art Psychotherapy at Belfast School of Art. Pamela trained as an art therapist in Vancouver and has worked in Canada, Malaysia and Ireland. Pamela has written extensively on art therapy, including chapters on Materials and Media in Art Therapy, Art Therapy and Postmodernism and Found Objects in Art Therapy. She has also written editorials and articles on environmental art therapy, visual culture, festival art therapy and art therapy pedagogy. She is interested in contemporary art and creative health, environmental art therapy, the walking studio, and the art of gatherings.
PLEASE NOTE: Spaces for this workshop are limited, so if you can no longer attend please cancel your ticket. This will allow someone else to take your place.
Organised by Naomi Polonsky and Lorna Dillon the curators of What Lies Beneath: Women, Politics, Textiles, in collaboration with curatorial assistants Laura Moseley, Koni Borowiak, Francesca Vella Bonnici and Annie Roberts. Supported by a University of Cambridge Public Engagement Starter Grant, the Leverhulme Trust and the Association for Art History.
Image: Francisca Aninat, Arpillera 3, 2008