PRAXIS PROPELLER COURSE
FEBRUARY 1 - MAY 1, 2025
For artists with long-term praxes who do not want to pursue further degree studies but wish to revive, focus, and deepen their practice, enrich it with new resources, and connect with an international community for a creative surge.
If you’re a creative practitioner a with long-term praxis who wants to revive, focus, and deepen your practice, then our Praxis Propeller course is just what you need to kickstart your personal revolution.
During this three-month course you’ll enrich your praxis with new resources, nourish and strengthen your creativity by building new habits that will sustain and reinvigorate your praxis going forward, and connect with an international creative community for an energetic surge that will open up new artistic horizons for you.
You have the option to work with our advisors for one-to-one meetings monthly (or however you and your advisor wish) in session packets of three meetings.
ORIENTATION SESSION
February 08 tbc
16:15-15:30 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
AGENDA: 2-MIN PRAxis INTROs (WORK IN CHAT OPTIONALLY),
SAFER SPACE agreement, COURSE DATES, COURSE OVERVIEW, CONTEXT, EXPECTATION, Goals
COURSE SESSIONS
The WORLD AS SCULPTURE
february 22 15:15 - 18:15 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
SYLLABUS:
This hybrid workshop, which bookends a short practical exercise with a presentations and a class discussion, rests upon the following assertion: if the three primary modes of sculptural production, understood as the additive (modeling or assembling), the subtractive (carving), and the replicative (casting), are reduced to their simplest terms (i.e., adding, subtracting, or copying) and then decoupled from sculptural production, these abstracted processes can then potentially function as lenses through which we can arrive at fresh understandings of other, non-sculptural forms of practice, and then use these strategies to re-make (or un-make) pre-existing works.
Goals include:
To facilitate an understanding of the three principal modes of sculptural production and the ways in which they can be used as a lens through which to re-think production in other media.
To explore the implications of this re-purposing of sculptural strategies through an individual creative exercise.
To gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which additive, subtractive and replicative methods function in our individual praxes.
TALK TBA
March 22 15:15 - 18:15 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
TITLE, ARTIST, DESCRIPTION TBA
HACKING THE ART/LIFE BALANCE
aPRIL 26 15:15 - 18:15 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
SYLLABUS:
This short workshop takes a fresh look at how we individually and collectively negotiate the difficult act of balancing being an artist with being fully present in the rest of our lives. As a group we’ll be sharing our favourite tips, tricks, and hacks for making more (or less) space for making, as well as examining some widely-held assumptions about the amount of time that’s needed for deep engagement in practice, and questioning the value of productivity for its own sake, given the increasingly critical relationship between productivity and sustainability during the climate emergency.
Goals include:
To share and gain tips, hacks and tools for making space and time for making.
To collectively discuss and validate our respective struggles and experiences with this aspect of creative praxes.
To examine and re-evaluate some of our tacit assumptions about the value of productivity, in light of the present climate emergency.
FUTURE PERFECT
APRIL - 16:15 - 19:15 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
SYLLABUS:
This short workshop looks simultaneously forwards and backwards in time in order to examine our individual practices and better understand where we have been and where we have come from as artists and where we might go next, tomorrow and in years to come.
Drawing upon writings by Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Baldwin, Honoré De Balzac, T.S. Eliot, Siri Hustvedt, and Henri Lefebvre, amongst others, the workshop will blend short presentations, class discussions of (and responses to) works of art, works of fiction, and fictional artworks, and creative practical exercises.
We’ll reconsider the creative family trees which give rise to our individual practices and the competing and sometimes contradictory aims and urges inherent in these narratives. We’ll also attempt to identify as-yet-unthought possibilities for our practices, with a view to reimagining our individual and collective future trajectories.
Goals include:
To think about pastness and futurity as tools for reframing, re-examining, and refreshing our thinking about our praxes.
To facilitate a deeper understanding and awareness of our individual lineages as creative practitioners – what are the trajectories of influence that have bought us to this point?
To imagine where we might go next as creative practitioners, both in the immediate future and over longer timescales.
TALK TBA
APRIL - 15:00 - 16:00 UTC ZOOM LINK (Recorded)
TITLE, ARTIST, DESCRIPTION TBA
Course Leader
Michael Bowdidge is an artist, researcher and educator who works with found objects, images and sound. He received his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1989, and completed his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. His PhD took the form of a practice-based investigation into the possibilities and context of contemporary sculptural assemblage considered in relation to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin.