Silverwood Park Residency with Seth Eberle and Anne Wendland – 5 hours
This week at Silverwood I assisted with two classes, one onsite program, and one outreach program. I had my second opportunity to help with SPARK, a monthly program for adults with memory loss and their caretakers. Seth used the same art project that was offered at NED, screen printing invasive plant species on to wood panel. We followed a similar structure though we did remove the marker/background decoration because SPARK is contained within a one-hour time frame and other activities are offered.
We were able to give more choices when it came to printing because we had a smaller group (due to social distancing recommendations, two care centers canceled). To keep clean up simple we only used one ink color per screen but with a small group, most people were able to select their plant and color. This was helpful because there was less creative liberty with this project.
The outreach program that I participated in was an ongoing collaboration with Hennepin Public Libraries. The activity was Melty, Muddy, Mucky Spring and featured a mud painting art project and a nature station about spring. This drop-in activity was a lot of fun to host. Kids were excited about the paint containing random bits of dirt and mud from outside and were interested in the textures that the paint created in the examples we brought in.
Anne brought in photographs by Andy Goldsworthy that they laminated and offered as inspiration for students that were stuck when given a blank canvas. It was great to see some of the kids use the photographs as a launching point for their painting. Students started with markers to create their design and then added the mud paint on top. We had five different colors of paint but the students realized that the marker colors would bleed through the paint to create new or more saturated colors. We also helped the kids mix paint as they applied it to their canvas.
