Stone experiments is a creative workshop concept which helps you to assess your participants’ professional approaches and visualize it to the other participants. Furthermore it can function as a starting point for a common idea generation.
Visualizing your participants’ competences
Sometimes it can be difficult to have to put into words exactly how your professional approach is. Stone experiments is a workshop which allows the participants to show of their professional skillset in a visual and creative way that is not dependent on your level of english.
How to do it:
- Pick a stone that you like. If you should explore this stone with your profession in mind (art teacher, biology teacher, artist, musician etc.). How would you do it? What would be interesting about the stone to you?
- Turn your thoughts into a small experiment. Which experiment do you want the other participants to try? How can you, from your professional point of view, get them to explore the stone via your experiment?
You will get 2 min to present your idea and how it connects to your profession. Then there is max 10 min for the other participants to try your experiment. Therefore, it must be a smaller experiment that people can do in a shorter time.
Ask yourself:
How would I explore this stone if I had to use it as a starting point in my teaching/artistic practice?
For example:
-
- If you are a chemistry teacher would you put it into a certain type of liquid to see how it reacts with the liquid?
- If you are a sculptor would you then chip little pieces of it to make it into a different shape?
- If you are a …. Would you then …?
You are free to choose whatever kind of stone you want to use, what it is made of, how big it is and how it looks. You are free to use whatever additional materials you want in order to carry out the experiment. But have in mind to make it affordable and easy to do. Remember to have additional stones for the other participants.
Good advice:
Choose a basic medium which has many different uses in both the humanistic and natural science sector. We chose a stone as it is easy to access, free to get a hold of and is used in many different contexts. It could also be a leaf, a piece of paper, a piece of plastic etc. The choice is yours.
What follows is the recipe of the exercise when using stone as the medium:
Using the stone as a tool to translate ideas into practise worked very well. a lovely way to approch your own practise throuh something concrete.