Forest workshop is an experimental art education project focusing on nature.
What do we do?
Searching for the roots of life
Learning from nature
How?
Forest workshop has collaborated with different artists, educators, and institutions. This adventure learning consisted of exploring forests, making arts in art schools and institutions, reflecting and discussion together. This is a trip to the forest and an experiential process for learning.
Explore Feeling
The perception and understanding of nature spirits, or elemental beings, is essentially connected with a task that one can call "cosmic," an evolutionary task that only human beings can accomplish because of their special position within the cosmos. That is why the question about elemental beings is intimately bound up with the whole cosmos and its evolution, as expressed in the traditions of Christianity (Rudolf Steiner, 1995).
Nature is the energy for inspiring the understandings of the holistic world. One of the key tasks of Forest workshop is to bring children back to the forest, to build up their own relationships with nature, to percept the environment, to ask and explore the meaning and the future as human beings.
In the forest, we will lead children to do all kinds of activities with artistic approaches, for example, collecting the voices and memories, finding the way, or drawing with different perspectives.
We believe that the forest can communicate with generations."
Open Thinking
The understandings about the landscape are "programmed ideological and economic activity steered by many other factors than art alone. It involves patriotism, political unity, a leveling of class distinctions, and the promotion of tourism and the nation's forest industry (Finland Depicted - In Hearts and Minds, p4)." This citation is from the curator Tuija Wahltoos for the landscape painting exhibition, Finland Depicted-In Hearts, and Minds. Nature is never pure.
Based on the visual culture perspective, we promote visual thinking strategy, which is a compacity to generate the meanings from seeing through emphasizing how to see and how to think. At the same time, we collaborate with different institutions and individual experts and researches to provide knowledge from diverse fields and angles.
Once, I asked the expert from the Museum, “what's the meaning of these masters’ great works created hundreds of years ago for today's people?”
Erica, the educational curator replied slowly, ” Maybe the question itself, standing in front of an old painting and asking the meaning, already can inspire different ways of looking at art and our life…”
Free Making
Forestworkshop provides great opportunities to experience Finnish education with local teachers and students together. Currently, Porvoo Art School as our partner hosts the international participants. It will offer intensive three-day-workshop during the summer.
Porvoo Art School is one of the biggest art schools in Finland located in the historical town of Porvoo. Since 1985, Porvoo Art School has offered both basic art education and advanced workshop studies for around 750 children and young people between the ages of 1 to 19 years. Developing children’s different visual abilities with different materials in various ways is the spirit of the school. It emphasizes improving children's visual abilities than just producing works of art. The Art School teaches the value of your own work as well as the work of others through different approaches.
When one's own creativity and modes of expression develop, the ability to interpret images and visual culture also expands.
