Another visiting artist came last weekend for a 3-day workshop in our studio. Stephen Farrell has created a way of working he calls graft, or grafting. By taking two very different subjects and combining them (or grafting one onto another), you can get some really interesting results. We each chose a fable and a broad knowledge domain, such as dentistry, bowling, botany. My group chose fishing. We were to take the broad fishing domain and tell the story of our fable using only language from the fishing domain. Sounds very confusing, but we had a whole weekend of exercises leading up to the final. It was an intense weekend, but I really enjoyed experiencing another totally different process.
The work above is from our exercises. We exchanged fables and I got The Little Red Hen. Our first exercise was to graphically illustrate the combination of our domain and a sentence from our fable. I used a diagram of the sound waves from a fish locator and attempted to illustrate some of the repetitive nature of the dialogue in the fable, showing the animals who consistently say “Not I” and the one hen who says “I will”. The second image is of the hen scratchings from the beginning of the fable and the river current markings on maps that help fisherman know where to fish.
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