Less workshops can take the form of online workshops, collective experiences, participatory websites, mail correspondences, and more. These workshops are intended to be accessible from any location, and include a variety of subject matter within which community is fostered, generosity is valued, knowledge is exchanged, and experience is shared.
Scroll down for details on how to participate in each workshop:
Inherited Practices: An Exchange
ONGOING
Menley Hunt's project, Inherited Practices: An Exchange, considers the daily practices of our lives, such as washing, cooking, cleaning, and caring for our homes, and how we inherit these practices from those who taught them to us. This project asks us to notice our own unique domestic practices and appreciate others' ways of sustaining a home. Menley invites participants to create a form of documentation reflecting on their own inheritances, which can take the form of a photograph, a drawing, writing, a diagram, or anything that will fit in a standard sized envelope. For example, participants could send a notated picture of a cherished piece of furniture, share a family recipe, or explain a cleaning practice that was taught to them. Participants will mail in their contributions, which Menley will collect and document and then transform into a set of postcards. Each participant will then receive a postcard about another’s inherited practice in return.
To participate, fill out this form.
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Sculptor and photographer Menley Hunt is from South Carolina and based in the South East. Her practice elevates the domestic, values familial connection, and considers the spirituality of objects and place. She engages personal objects with photographic materials and is drawn to the physicality of film photography and darkroom processes. Additionally, Menley uses performative action and contemplative movement to illustrate her connection to significant women in her life, including her mother and grandmother. With these women she shares interests of baking, true crime, crocheting, mysteries, and a love of their home.
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Menley’s Website
PRIDE FELTING WORKSHOP
Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 6 pm (Edt)
Back by popular demand! A second felting workshop by Linds Parnell & Natasha Blush, in celebration of Pride Month: Collaborative artists NB+LP combine their individual interests in dance, sculpture, and time based art. Wet felting is an easy way to turn fibers like wool into fabric! This process is tactile and playful, especially when working with color. You are invited to join us for an evening celebrating queer identities as we each make a small felt that can become a wall hanging, a patch, or a set of coasters. Participants will be given all the needed supplies, including your choice of Pride flag color-coordinated wool.This workshop is open to everyone, including but not limited to LGBTQ+ community members. (We recommend children join with an adult helper.)
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Natasha Blush and Lindsay Parnell are collaborative cross-disciplinary artists that combine their individual interests in dance, sculpture, and time based art. They are currently focusing on wet felting as a performative process.
“As collaborative artists we focus on relationships – with each other, with our body, and with physical spaces. Our work is performative and the objects that we create act as documentation of our shared experiences. These ongoing felt works are playful and bright, inspiring viewers to join in on the warm soapy making. Wet felting is a process that is not exact or time consuming and often we ask for volunteers to join us and learn the basic skills in exchange for their attention. Finished pieces are messy, honest in their handmade qualities and the variety of participants. We hope that by performing our conversations and processes we inspire viewers to draw connections between our actions and the interactions of our community. Can some of the attention and care that they give this process also be used to heal the people around us?”
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Linds and Nat’s Website
compassion. communication. connection.
tuesday, may 17, 2022 at 7 pm (edt)
This workshop with Gabrielle Johnson is for humans and their dogs, as well as humans without their dogs. Explore how we increase connection and compassion through conversation and increased communication using play. We are excited to include an opportunity for participants to engage in conversation with their dog, but participants without pets will also enjoy and benefit from our collaboration. Play components are shared from Dr. Amy Cook's "The Play Way", which supports safety and well-being in dogs who are reactive or anxious, which is adapted from her experience in human play therapy.
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Gabrielle Johnson is a trauma-informed behavior consultant and owner of Best Life Dog Services. They work with families whose dogs display aggressive behaviors or experience clinical anxiety. Gabrielle is driven by the notion that when people are able to better understand their dog's needs and effectively communicate there is an overall increase in compassion, connection, and joy in that relationship. Their hope is that the insight gained in a person's behavior journey with their dog extends to other relationships in one's world, including the one they have with themselves.
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Gabrielle’s Website
PARTICIPATORY felting workshop
:Tuesday, april 19, 2022 at 6 pm (eDt)
Linds Parnell & Nat Blush's project addresses corporality, care, and communication through a participatory felting workshop. Participants will be mailed a package of materials in advance of the workshop and will work at home while together in an online community as the artists guide them through the processes of both felting and caretaking.
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Natasha Blush and Lindsay Parnell are collaborative cross-disciplinary artists that combine their individual interests in dance, sculpture, and time based art. They are currently focusing on wet felting as a performative process.
“As collaborative artists we focus on relationships – with each other, with our body, and with physical spaces. Our work is performative and the objects that we create act as documentation of our shared experiences. These ongoing felt works are playful and bright, inspiring viewers to join in on the warm soapy making. Wet felting is a process that is not exact or time consuming and often we ask for volunteers to join us and learn the basic skills in exchange for their attention. Finished pieces are messy, honest in their handmade qualities and the variety of participants. We hope that by performing our conversations and processes we inspire viewers to draw connections between our actions and the interactions of our community. Can some of the attention and care that they give this process also be used to heal the people around us?”
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Linds and Nat’s Website
sharing, Remembering
ongoing
Sharing, Remembering is an online space created by Bethany Allen that invites you to engage in a collective sharing of thoughts, feelings and expressions about the loss of loved ones. Based on her personal experience with loss, Bethany hopes that this site provides an invitation for expressions around loss that we might not have the opportunity or capacity for within our regular social scenarios. Participants can contribute by sharing a writing, photo, drawing, quote, or anything else meaningful to them, or they can engage by simply visiting the site. Contributions can be signed or anonymous and will be published once a month.
Please visit the site here for a more detailed invitation from Bethany and if you would like to submit an entry.
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Bethany is an artist, gardener, homemaker, and heart-thinker who lives in Hanover, Virginia. She makes work that comes from the meaning, beauty and challenges she finds in her daily life. She likes sharing, thinking, and feeling together with others and often works on creative projects with her collaborator Joseph. Most recently, they are working on completing an album of music that will be released in February! She has also recently been thinking and learning a lot about non-monogamy, land and spaces, and communication.
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Bethany’s Instagram
Neutral Gear, Full Trust
saturday, February 12, 2022 at 11 am (est)
Neutral Gear, Full Trust a workshop by Isabel Lee, is a soft introduction to Tai Chi and its philosophy of mindfulness and meditation in motion. It will walk through the ways in which Tai Chi is the embodiment of “less” through cultural and philosophical context, personal perception, and some small demonstrations that participants are invited to follow along to or just observe. It hopes to provide an uncomplicated insight into the poetry of Tai Chi and its guiding principles of yielding, softness, slowness, balance, and rootedness.
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Isabel Lee is an artist figuring out how she wants to be in the world. She lives in Richmond, VA. Her areas of personal interest and ongoing research include:
languages of love and care
power and strength in softness
scent as a medium of communication and experience
cooking and sharing food
grocery shopping
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Isabel’s Instagram
CHarmed, I’m sure
February 1-24, 2022
Charmed, I’m Sure is a project by George Ferrandi that reimagines socialization and the process of making friends with strangers during the Covid era. It invites individual participants to engage in a guided story-telling session with the artist herself, resulting in new personal connections as well as a series of drawings which she will publish and distribute.
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For the last several years, George Ferrandi’s work as an artist has centered on direct social engagement of one type or another. Some projects have culminated in community-driven parades, some in fantastic live performances with highly untrained, mostly willing non-professionals, some in simple subway rides with strangers. Obviously, the pandemic and necessary social distancing have prompted her to question what social engagement can look like in her work during these strange days, as well as what kind of interactions she’s missing in her life, so she’s been developing projects that celebrate personal interaction and also volunteer a kind of intimacy in voice that she hopes is welcome during these socially distant and remotely focused times.
She also likes gardening and making cocktails.
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