The Artist
Tansy Hargan is a British artist based in Sheffield, U.K. With a background in architecture and landscape architecture, Tansy’s art is an exploration of place, time and materiality. “I explore urban and rural places with my sketchbook, making brisk marks and colour blocks to simplify and record snapshots of what I experience. Repetition and annotation are important parts of my practice, both in helping me see and understand concepts and typologies and as a way of generating multiple compositions for distinct bodies of work. My mixed media palette is an allusion to the materials and mechanisms of landscape: it is layered and adapted, diverse and inventive. I deconstruct old garments to harvest high quality fabrics, which I combine with utility textiles and commercial by-products, such as tailors’ waste. My methods mimic geophysical activity, as I alter reclaimed textiles by staining, bleaching, scraping, scoring, and slashing. My work develops in stages, with layers added and taken away repeatedly, and traces of past iterations visible through and between subsequent veils and fibres.”
The Workshop
This course will introduce you to Tansy’s mixed media thumbnail sketching method: from simple mark making and en plein air sketching to developing grids using playful concepts. Tansy will show you how to use viewfinders of all shapes and sizes to select and crop multiple compositions and record them in grids across a sketchbook spread. This technique is perfect for on-the-hoof sketching, when time is short; and for slow sketching where critical observation, annotation, and detail are the aim. As well as being a pleasurable activity in itself, thumbnail sketching works very well as part of another creative process such as textiles.
No drawing experience necessary. All materials provided. Please feel free to bring your own sketchbook and art supplies, if you have materials you favour or things you’d like to enjoy using but aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Tansy will bring along a small selection of sketching tools and art media available to purchase, for anyone that wants to take their new skills home but doesn’t own much of an art kit.
3 June 2023 10am - 4.30pm
£90 Includes all materials & refreshments - please bring along lunch or alternatively visit one of the two Cafes on site or the award winning farm shop.