Writing and Drawing Workshops with Daksha Patel

Last week, Creative Writing students were given the opportunity to work with our resident artist Daksha Patel. Daksha is an artist interested in how we visually and symbolically map space, the body and how we translate between word and image and word as image. You can find more of Daksha’s work at: http://dakshapatel.co.uk/

Daksha ran workshops for both first and second year CW students and the sessions involved exploring the synergies between processes of drawing and writing. Students considered words as objects with their own weight, texture and shape as opposed to simply seeing words as markers for vocal sounds and meanings. By doing this, students were offered a way of reflecting not only on the words they use, but on how those words are presented. 

 

We can see here how students are embodying word meaning in a visual way. This is a simple technique, but one clearly aware that words are objects, mini-world, proud islands in the sea of language. After these exercises, Daksha got students to work on integrating a drawing with writing to simultaneously express an idea, a narrative, a character. 

Daksha said of the workshops that “I really enjoyed it and students were fantastic. Quite a few spoke to me at the end of each day to say they had explored new ways of working and ideas which they could take forward in their practice so I was pleased.”

What I love most about this kind of event is that it taps directly into a belief I have in the connections between the artforms. Not only does all art share a history of ideas and a connection with wider historical processes and the societies from which they come, but they are all united by a distinctively artistic form of expression, a form of expression that is not simply and easily paraphrasable or substitutable.  As a Professor of mine once put it, in ‘the symbols of dream, myth, religion, art, - the meaning is inextricably embedded in the specific symbolic formulation and cannot be extracted without diminution’. This means that while each art is justifiably independent, they can- and do- connect in irreducibly unique ways. 

                My thanks goes out to Daksha and to all the students who agreed to share their work!

Dr Craig Jordan-Baker

Subject Leader in Creative Writing