You are here: Materiality, Movement and Mapping

About

​How do we capture the live experience? How can this experience be recorded, controlled or even disrupted?

Exploring and investigating creative ways to respond to works from the Tate collection you have the opportunity to research and create your own artworks individually and collectively using a range of material processes and conceptual approaches which map experience.

This practical and ideas driven course takes place in and around the newly opened Tate Modern spaces with exclusive, after hours access to art works which focus primarily on participatory (or interactive) installation, live art and conceptual engagement. These works become a platform to discuss the experiential in art – the experience one receives from the work – and to explore the ways in which artists’ document or control, through material means, the live experience.

Week One – Recording the Experiential

Beginning with a tour of the new Tate galleries we become familiar with the works and artists featured. We will have time for discussion followed by a structured exercise to create your first practical responses to the experiences and ideas initiated or provoked by the exhibits.

Week Two – Mapping and Movement

Using examples from Tate’s collection and with reference to such groups as Fluxus, Art and Language and the Situationist Internationale and artists such as Tino Sehgal, you will develop your own set of written and or visual instructions, such as a map, through which to interpret the art works within the gallery spaces. 

Week Three – Material interventions

Taking inspiration from Duchamp and his ground breaking gallery interventions such as Sixteen Miles of String, you will create interventions to reframe or re-contextualise the exhibits. You will work with and develop a range of mark making and construction approaches to map movement and create material responses, using physical marks to record movement or creating props to act as intermediaries for experiencing or responding to the exhibits. 

Week Four – Experiential revisited 

Finish making your material intervention, map, instructions or disruptions and invite your fellow participants to revisit and re-experience the art works within Tate Modern through the intermediary of the work you have created.

This course is suitable for all levels and would suit those who are keen to experiment and explore their creativity, make exciting new artworks and meet new people, within in a gallery context. Some materials will be provided.

The course is led by artist Sarah Sparkes who works with installation, public engagement, performance and film and painting within in her own practice.