Nicola writes:
In January I was delighted to be asked to run a creative breakout workshop on my ‘Radio Drawings’ technique, at this year’s Techne Congress. Techne is an organisation that supports PhD researchers at universities in the south east of England, including Kingston, where I am studying, with funding, training, placements and events.
In January, Kingston hosted the 2022 Techne Congress on the theme of ‘Re-enchantment’. There were some fascinating contributions challenging the dominant structures and ethos of academic institutions, and a pervasive theme of pushing back against neoliberalism and marketisation to expand inclusivity and a reorganisation of academic priorities towards equality of knowledge.
My workshop was scheduled for a lunchtime slot and around 20 people showed up, which was a good number considering the densely packed timetable. After the welcome and introduction I suggested a warm-up exercise, where participants drew a five-second tree and wrote word associations on ‘January’ and ‘existential’. We then moved into the Radio Drawings. I had chosen the first 6-7 minutes of a BBC Radio dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s A Pocketful of Rye, with June Whitfield as Miss Marple. Christie, who was published from the 1920s to the 1970s, was famous for her mastery of the murder-mystery novel genre. Her work is a treasure trove of social attitudes on class, gender, race, wealth, dis/ability and – in her later books – homo/sexuality, with nuanced and fluctuating levels of conscious ironic distance and identifications with her upper-class characters and their satellite social inferiors. My main reason for choosing an Agatha Christie adaptation is because the action is fast – the enciting incident immediate and the imagery plentiful. I wanted lots of objects, characters, costumes, artifacts and voices – and lightness and fun. Above all I wanted people to relax and enjoy themselves. If received consciously and with awareness by critical minds, Christie is very amusing.
I asked participants to begin by closing their eyes and taking a couple of long breaths, to help minds slow down. Then I invited everyone to listen, enjoy, draw, write, as much or a little as they liked, and big or as small as they felt moved to, and to keep it all on one page if possible. Some three or four people showed their work at the end and five participants were kind enough to send me photographs of their drawings, which I show below.
We had a short discussion about the process and comments received afterwards included the words below. Thank you to Techne for inviting me to run the session, to all the partcipants for coming along and joining in, and to the five who kindly sent me their photographs. I will add any more that come in! Send to [email protected].
‘I enjoyed your online workshop, it offered light relief especially after an intensity of attending the Techne congress online … The workshop was a breath of fresh air, and nice to do something that was engaging with other people, as well as allowing the mind to escape from having to take things in. ‘
Spike
‘Your workshop was a lot of fun and I wish it had gone on longer!’
Gareth
‘Thank you for a lovely session Nicola!’
Rachel
‘That was a great thing to do, especially between sessions when it’s good to change the brain. I found myself drawing a teddy bear I had as a child that was called Percival, the same name as one of the character’s sons. It looks like he is counting the money :)’
Nichola
