Workshop: A Pond Is a Bag

A hands-on “material collage” workshop

Join us for a practical workshop exploring the test materials and process fragments behind POND. Touch, peel, tear, pull, combine, stick, connect, and build your own material habitat from pooled matter.

In POND, both artists work with self-organising materials that do things: they shift, soften, stain, oxidise, break down, resist, and reorganise over time. Process isn’t just a method here; it’s a collaboration. Materials have agency, and to truly meet them, you have to meet them with your body: through touch, pressure, smell, friction, and care.

This workshop invites you into that relationship.

We’ll gather 8 participants around one table, surrounded by materials that appear in the exhibition, alongside additional test pieces and experimental fragments made specifically for this session. The materials we often feel most attached to, sometimes even more than finished works. They hold the moment a material first revealed itself, and that tenderness is something we want to share.

Together, you’ll handle and transform these materials by peeling, tearing, pulling out strands and layers and compose your own material collage. As Ursula K. Le Guin speculated in her seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the first cultural device was probably a recipient, the shape of a novel is a bag. In this light, we see a pond as being a carrier, recipient, a holder of many forms, residues, beings and soft disruptions. Join us in thinking of POND as a bag, collecting the materials and processes symbolic of our practices, to create your own personal bag or pond. 

What you’ll do

Handle a curated selection of material tests and fragments from both artists

Extract pieces through gentle force: peel / tear / pull / separate layers

Compose and fix your own small material collage

Share the table with others in a slow, embodied making session


Materials provided. No prior experience needed.