Walking and drawing workshop with Mary Husted and Valerie Coffin Price

This drawing workshop will introduce the idea of personal mapping of the city / Cardiff Bay through a range of responses - including drawing, talking, writing and iPhone visual note taking. Part of our experience of living in the 21st century is linked to fragmentation: the drawing-walking workshop will show you how to scan the landscape and pinpoint detail. Various drawing strategies will be introduced throughout the day.

The Chinese Folding book is central to the workshop. These books when unfolded can be up to 2 metres long, however when folded they are very compact.

The workshop will start at Bay Art with a tour of Mary Husted’s exhibition at BayArt, followed by the walking workshop. The group will take a carefully selected route, each individual being given a Chinese folding sketchbook and a set of instructions for their walk. The walk will be easy and on tarmacced surfaces. Total distance approx 2 miles

10.30 - 11.30 meet at Bay Art to see exhibition, have coffee and discuss the work
11.30 -1 walk, draw and talk in the Bay
1 - 1.45 lunch (at Bay Art, in cafe, or sandwiches outside)
1.45 - 3.30 Fair weather option: carry on walking and drawing
Foul weather option: develop morning work at BayArt
3.30-4.00 lay out work, discuss individual responses

Materials

Each participant will be provided with a small folding sketchbook. BayArt will provide various papers for rubbings, water soluble pencils, graphite sticks and various drawing materials for use during the workshop

Please bring cameras, mobiles, sketching material, lunch, protective clothing

If the weather is inclement please be ready for short sessions of outdoor walking and wear suitable clothing

About the Artists

Mary Husted is a visual artist based in Cardiff, Wales. She has always kept notebooks as a way of recording her first responses to the world about her, using words and images. In 2012 she started a project called ‘Open Books: artists and the Chinese folding book’, in which artists were given blank ‘concertina’ books to fill. A first exhibition opened in 2012 in the National Library of Wales and since then it has been touring the world, traveling to China, Australia, Canada, India and USA, gathering works by new artists from those countries on its way.

Her current work continues in books, but also in a new body of work, consisting of groups of framed works and wall-mounted boxes. This work, ‘the Calligraphy of Landscape’, forms part of the exhibition ‘Lois Williams and Mary Husted’ in March and April 2018 in BayArt, Cardiff.

Valerie Coffin Price is an artist‐letterer based in Cardiff, Wales. Her work responds to the poetic resonance of language and its connection to the environment and cultural identity. As part of this her work involves an immersion in the landscape through walking.

Recent projects include: All Rivers Flow to the Sea (2015-19); Place @ Dyffryn Gardens (2016-17); Connected Studio, with BBC Wales (2016); A Fold in the River, a collaborative book with poet Philip Gross (2015); Thinking Like a Wetland, with academics from Cambridge, Bristol & Finland (2012-13); RiverMap, with 7 other artists on behalf of the Cotswold Conservation Board (2013); Intimate Cartographies (2011).