ALEX CRAIG
Sculpture, Furniture and Installation
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Community Arts Project Leader, asylum centres around Croatia (September-October 2016)
Uniting the fields of support work and the arts, my aim was to distract people from their current situation, give them something creative, cathartic and productive to do, to encourage them to join in together as a group and to make something collectively, which they could display around the hotel and feel proud of.
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I started with group exercises, discussing what art can be and what forms it can take, including drawing, writing, painting, sculpture, performance art, film and sound.
The challenge was to keep both groups interested while keeping things simple and brief, so as to be clearly understood. The children’s activities included drawing exercises, making sock puppets with an emphasis on the individual characters children would invent for them, making friendship bracelets and automatic drawing to music I had brought to liven up the sessions and communicate with on a musical level, as well as a verbal and physical one.
With the adults, we explored automatic drawing and sculpting in clay, searching for found objects to make a collaborative, conceptual work which we could install or display around the hotel somewhere and drawing one another with time constraints of two minutes, one minute then thirty-second lengths.
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Four people collaborated on this multimedia scene depicting the journey, struggle and hardships they and their friends had gone through in getting to Croatia. We installed it in the reception of their temporary accommodation.
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In this sculpture - Porin 1 - I managed to do exactly what I set out to in my mission statement: commune with people and provide a sculptural response which embodies my connection with them. Every time I touch it or look at it, I can see, hear and feel the much-loved people who were with me when I made it. Each one of those people, and my connection and love for them, will forever be contained in that tangible piece of clay.
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