FOREST BATHING, BODY ARCHITECTURE, VISUAL LITERACY, PATTERN RECOGNITION
Sourcing a lifelong practice and study with movement (dance and yoga), meditation, visual and spacial arts, this page is a sample of workshops and courses offered. Please contact me to arrange courses and workshops: rachel@rachelwolfe.com
FOREST BATHING (SKOGSBÅD)
Students choose and place pigments on paper, paper is rolled, and collected by group leader.
An outdoor, mindful hike brings the group to form a circle prior to other exercises. In the circle, students practice breathing and body exercises. Students are then guided to choose trees, by hugging and pressing each tree with their paper, the students are verbally guided to tune-in to feel the tree and their experience. The group returns together to discuss their experiences in an open format. There are no wrong answers and the space is safe for open sharing. The students are then guided back to the school to allow their papers the dry. The paper is later glued onto the group scroll for created a history of the course.
The course is conducted in English and/or Norwegian. The format allows for adaptation to students and situations. The course engages in sensing, feeling, mindfulness, cooperation, and engages confidence.
Rachel has 22 years of experience in mindful practices of meditation and yoga, and in art, performance, installation, and communications.
BODY ARCHITECTURE explores the body as architecture of personal and public space. The body serves as the first point of contact in Locus of Control. Locus of Control is about responsibility for influencing what surrounds our bodies and being influenced by what surrounds our bodies. The goals of the workshop are to create a healthy balance within the individual and group through play, interactivity, and practice.
Workshop Format
- 3 exercises within 1-1.5 hour format including warm-up and cool-down:
- Make the body to mirror the architecture.
- Make the body form by individual choice.
- Make the body of group members into forms organically chosen by the group.
Previous Event http://bit.ly/2xktTDE Public event for Open House Oslo for BOHO held at: Sentralen, Øvre Slottsgate 3, 0157 Oslo, Norway
VISUAL LITERACY courses focus on development of critically thinking and understanding visual cues.
The Visual Literacy course makes use of still and moving images to teach histories and perspectives in meaning making. Reading images by signs, symbols, contexts of history and art history. The course utilises photography with students and refers to history in art and photography for learning. Students make their own photos and learn how to write and speak about the meaning of their signs, symbols, and historic context. Archetypes, narrative structures, abstraction and representation, and incorporating Roland Barthes, Death of the Author, the course examines the roles of the viewer and viewed. Going through graphic design, history of painting, photography, film making, historic contexts and propaganda. The aims are to cultivate understandings in the ways subjects are imagined and projected, and provide the critical thinking skills necessary for students of all ages to navigate communicating through images.
SEGMENT ONE
Reading and conversations about spectral light frequencies, pigments, black and white, affect, focus and framing.
SEGMENT TWO
History of painting and the instances where these figures and themes repeat ancient allegory and archetypes today. Assignments to create visual and written documentation of chosen archetypes and subjects.
SEGMENT THREE
Film making and ghost images. This segment goes into the psychology of the subject and ways objects are made and projected. Reading Kafka and film analysis.
SEGMENT FOUR
Timing, context and decoding propaganda. Reading graphic posters, symbols, and comics. Reading and assignment to create poster or comic.
ADDITIONAL SEGMENTS AS SEMESTER PERMITS
PATTERN RECOGNITION METHOD, (teaching and artistic process), meditation, drawing, movement, writing, video. This method began developing from 2014/2015 through 2021 and is protected by intellectual property rights; for interest, permissions of usage, contact: rachel@rachelwolfe.com
The program is based on a method of kinaesthetic learning. Meditation, drawing, and physical movement create visual results within an individual and group dynamic. The multisegment process was formed for the basis of: art making, teaching, and counsel. Pattern Recognition was built alongside artistic research projects Solfége Souche, Afjordance, and Magnetics In-Material. Pattern Recognition Projects are involved with the field of Embodied Cognition. apply principles in John Haugeland’s book on Artificial Intelligence and Pedagogical writings on Locus of Control, in methods of learning through doing. Designed to develop critical thinking skills while forming healthy relationships and understandings with terrains and temporality, the methods serve as means for new connections and realisations within the practitioners. Pattern Recognition The Pattern Recognition projects work dynamically with memory, behavior, lineage, choices, and agency with individuals through the Vision and Body Relationship, including coordination and motor skill development. There are presently seven segments with room for performance, sound and technology collaborations.
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SEGMENT ONE
The first step is to experience a sensitised exploration of the environment, such as the practice of Forest Bathing. City environments can also be used. Through meditation and movement to go into contact with intuition. The intuition guides the gathering of materials from the environment.
SEGMENT TWO
The second step is to draw materials from the environment. Following an axial rotation similar to the scientifically reported rotation of the earth, the faces (planes) of the dimensional materials are drawn. In this example, drawings were made, the tracings make the under-layers visible on the new top layers of tracings. The concept is to make the impressions of the dynamic modes of axial rotation visible. The practice brings awareness to the memory and sensory ways a visible detail can fade in visibility but remain within under-layers.
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SEGMENT THREE
The third step is involves Visual and Somatic Memory. The lines drawn in the previous exercise are performed as body movements. Exercises are practiced independently, leaving room for personal interpretation. A group environment affords the opportunity to coordinate independent movements into a group arrangement of movements. Records of these practices are used for reflection and to witness development of reflexive awareness over time.
SEGMENT FOUR
To experience nature, and nurture concepts of impression and transference, two transferrable materials are used with water and pigment. Other materials can be useful. For the sake of providing an example, gouache paintings with two pieces of paper follow 2 different impulse. 1 impulse to paint from memory. The 2nd impulse to paint from a photo.
To look at the difference between making something look like something else or using memory (embodied sense of experience) – the gouache painting exercise was carried out by making compositions based on memories of witnessing detailed areas of water flow, and composing paintings based on looking at a photograph. Viewers could immediately see the difference of reference from memory or image.
The gouache paintings were done on the “wrong side” of Japanese Washi paper, to transfer the pigments onto acid-free, black papers. The pigments left traces similar to the way a memory becomes a trace of lived experience or ways communication of forms become transferred onto what is underneath or nearby.
In addition to discerning difference in how forms are made by hand from referencing external or internal referents, is also considering the process of transfer. As the original can become a symbol for reading-as reading a book or remembering a book, the paint transferred to the surface under becomes the information absorbed.
SEGMENT FIVE
A mirroring exercise, completed with language and/or illustration. By writing a letter in reverse, to see how it appears through a material and in a mirror. The practice is based on the mechanics of a single-reflex camera and the way the eye perceives reality directly which is then flipped in the brain. This practice develops understanding of communication and the two-way nature of the way read symbols are transmitted and interpreted.
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SEGMENT SIX
A relational exercise, completed with vision, drawing, space and relating. Participants have each a drawing tool and paper. They interlock arms and being to simultaneously draw a portrait of the other. While drawing the awareness of space, cooperation, coordination, patience and additional soft qualities are activated. After the process is complete, a portrait reveal and discussion follows the activity. This practice develops understanding of the dynamic relating skills people engage with their vision and experience of reality.
SEGMENT SEVEN
The method builds a process to be performed. The activity can be performed as a solo, duo, or in a group organisation. There is no limit to the number of participants, only that the processes are done a priori to the perfuming of the lines and learnings with the body. The next two segments can be one or the other, or both of them. The performance is to be recorded. The performance can be done in private or to an audience.
