Through performance workshops, artist Erena Dellaporta invites you to explore with them a new strand of her work connected to the idea of 'den'.
One definition for a den is - “a wild mammal's hidden home; a lair”. It is also defined as a hide out, a space that facilitates children’s imaginative play. It helps them create the make-believe world they want to inhabit. At home, variants of dens reappear on a daily basis and they seem to be a somewhat intimate and safe space for my children to play, imagine and wonder.
In the workshops, the artist will work with families, parents & children. Parents will be encouraged to re-emerge themselves into the world of play with their children. All participants will explore creating and telling abstracted and fabricated stories that link to maternal and domestic life. They will connect to their thoughts and feelings of living on the Estuary and on how valuable the sea is to their children and their lives as a family. What this environment provides them with, how they use it? How is it being looked after, taken care of?
The workshops will also emphasise the importance for outdoor free play for children and of keeping these places clean for them. Questions about how can we make our outdoor spaces, in particular beaches, more accessible to families will also be explored.
'Time in nature is not leisure time it’s an essential investment in our children’s health and also by the way in our own" Richard Lou - Last child in the woods.
About the organiser
Erene Dellaporta explores women’s experience of birth and motherhood and how society understands the post-partum journey. The relationship between mother and child is the focus of her work. The bodies of mother and child are bound together and appear to merge: the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the relationship, jokingly, to be like an omelette! The tangible and material transformation of a mother’s body, her changed sense of self and her loss of identity, seems silent or silenced.
Her practice has been driven by her relationship with her daughter, a constantly changing relationship marked by caring, which imbues an intuitive and restless energy. They draw together, inscribing and defacing the mothering guidebooks she's accumulated. Their collaboration is a daily ritual, a rebuke to, a rejection of, the image society wants us to be.
Although primarily working with drawing and kinds of mark making, she has created sculptural and three dimensional collages, attentive to the symbolic values, the metaphorical connotations of the materials used. These works evoke fragility and sensitivity, that of an infant feeding, other material bubble wrap, string and tape can signify states more malign, of overwhelm, of being bound.
This is an on going and developing series of works that she has been amalgamating and interactive installations and participator projects: inviting mothers (parents) to engage in defacing parenting "how to" books and embrace doing things their own way or to collaborate with their children and be led through imaginative creative play.
https://www.erenedellaporta.com/
Please book at the link below:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/womb-tickets-1318405058019?aff=oddtdtcreator
Image: Erene Dellaporta, Womb
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