A look at the artistic workspace

Yesterday, the Society of Friends gathered for sneak preview of the works the students at the fortress have been creating over the last three weeks. Wandering through the classes, talking to the teachers and watching the students at work, they gained an insight on how the different teachers were holding their classes.

Asked about hers, Katrin Plavcak explained how everything “is very open at the start. I simply let them be artists without second thoughts, and irritate them away from how they normally work.” We moved on to the slightly labyrinthine class of Rebecca Morris, who points out the benefits of different levels of experience in her students, and how “somebody who is 60 might have crazy ideas somebody who is 18 would never think of.”

This was proven only minutes later as one of her students shows us his work, or experiment, as he calls it. The students’ final task, described as deconstructing the picture plane, was carried out by him in the form of a brick on a pendulum crashing into a glass panel incorporated into his painting.

Still awed by the clever destruction, the Society arrived at the workspace lorded over by Dan and Lia Perjovschi, who proudly presented the spaces created by their students, taking time to talk in detail about the different projects and the people behind them. As Dan puts it, “ we want to be close to our students, understand what they want to do and help them get there.”

The last stop of the tour brings us to the printing lab of Krystyna Piotrowska, who shows us a whole heap of prints done by her students just this on this day. She watches over every print that is made, giving a hand and advice to her students. “I teach them every technique they are interested in, and some of my own I came up with” she says while carefully removing the paper covering a fresh print.

The works of the students will be displayed to the public on Friday, the 6^th of august, from 2 to 6 pm.