Temporary Arrangements (2025, ongoing)
Workshop series
Temporary Arrangements is a series of workshops exploring the creative process through activities spanning sculpture, drawing, writing, sound, movement, collage, and video. Instead of focusing on an end result, these sessions invite participants to experience improvisation, play, chance, and collaboration as vital tools for creative decision-making. Activities will build upon and respond to one another, adapting to the group's emerging interests, questions, and sensibilities.
The workshops aim to stimulate thinking around the creative process and the questions that arise along the way:
Why make art? Who do you make art for? What counts as art? How can art help us think through things or see things differently? How else can we use this way of thinking? Can art resist, interrupt, encourage? How does it feel in the body?
Gradually, we work towards an outcome. Together we ask what form it takes:
Who is it for? Who would they like to see? What would they like to say? What questions would they like to ask?
Key references include artists, movements and thinkers such as Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, FLUXUS, John Baldessari, Miranda Tufnell, Judson Dance Theatre.
The first iteration of workshops took place over fifteen sessions at Camden Arts Centre, working with young people from The Hive youth centre. Through a range of activities, the group composed and recomposed arrangements of objects and bodies through sculpture, drawing, writing, voice and collage, with material folding in upon itself as the sessions progressed.
The end result was a publication, itself a re-configuration of the creative decisions and materials made by the group, and a launch event where once again the objects and images were arranged in the space across new scales and combinations.
Throughout the project Sam’s approach ensured the group felt welcomed, listened to and empowered to take risks as they developed a shared visual language of collage, drawing and performance. By the culmination of the project the participants felt at home within the studio, proud of the work they were showing and confident in sharing their ideas, a testament to the environment and collective spirit Sam cultivated through the project.
Temporary Arrangements is a flexible structure of workshops available for different contexts, ages and timeframes.