During 2020, Uniqlo Tate Lates: Night In, brought a free online programme filled with artist talks, workshops, DJ sets, film and more. To keep us entertained this winter, Tate have re-realised three of the workshops that we can take part in at home.
These include creating your own mural at home with Lakwena, creating a zeen with the RIOT SOUP collective, and painting with Ashton Attzs.
00:16 Create Statement Artworks with Lakwena
Example of a mural by Lakwena
Lakwena is London-based artist who creates murals that reference elements of popular culture and using art as a form of meditation.
Her work, primarily text-based, employs a combination of words, pattern and acid-bright colour to subtly subvert prevailing mythologies. Her use of text and image re-appropriates the powerful and monumental visual language and lyrical mythologising of commercial advertising billboards and is informed by decoration both aesthetically and conceptually.
Interested in the role of the artist as mythmaker, Lakwena explores how this translates into contemporary popular culture. Concerned with the significance of how and who we decorate, and what this reflects about our values and beliefs, Lakwena positions kaleidoscopic colours, bold pattern and adornment as powerful signifiers to redefine and reassign value and glory. (Jealousgallery.co.uk)
In lockdown she has been painting her home with the aim of creating a space of meditation and relaxation. But also to create a feeling of protection, empowerment and healing.
Paintings created in her home during lockdown
Because we may not be able to, or perhaps don’t have the confidence, to paint straight onto our walls, Lakwena shows a technique whereby she paints magnetic paint onto the walls of her children’s bedroom and creates cardboard stencil lettering and shapes to then adhere to the walls. Creating instantly visually impacting decoration that is full of creativity and unqiue to you.
Screenshot of Tate Lates project
09:58 DIY Zines with RIOT SOUP Collective
Riot Soup Collective
RIOT SOUP is an art collective for women of colour, running monthly socials, curating exhibitions and hosting workshops. The 12 strong group is made up of Black African, Caribbean, South East Asian and Middle Eastern women artists, after their founder Asma Istwani failed to find a creative group that encompassed her needs as both a woman artist and person of colour.
She needed a space to create and grow as an artist but one where her experience and difference as a second generation Middle Eastern woman would be noticed, heard and valued as opposed to something that had to be diluted or cast aside in order to fit in. This fact, as well as the desire to see more women artists of colour represented in the visual art scene spurred a call out on various online sites to see if others would join her in the quest to create a community of like minded women and seize control of the narrative surrounding WOC, all the while seeing to their need of visibility within the artworld. (shado-mag.com/)
Screenshot of Tate Lates project
Founder Asma, a collage artist, and her sister Salma, a painter and collage artist, run through a workshop on tips for making your own Zeen using basic tools and papers to create something both visually stimulating and unique to them.
Tips include how to use negative space, colour blocking, adding/layering with drawings and paint, using type, and so on.
The video is starting point with all the inspiration you need to go off and create your own take on a zeen.
19:49 Nurturing Black Joy: Painting with Ashton Attzs
The last workshop is by Ashton Attzs, an illustrator and painter who creates bold, and colourful imagery. Her aim is to establish a balance between being political and joyful. Attzs is a London based painter and poet who wants to share her passion for painting, not only as a visual means of joy but for a cathartic practice. They take great great interest in capturing aspects of quotidian life as well as a personal exploration of queer and POC idenitity.
Stay in YA lane, Ashton Attzs
The workshop is aimed to reach out and give people that need support, more joy and a little pick me up in these hard times, dedicates her work to queer, black people. “Regardless of who you are, there is joy to be had in this workshop” (Ashton Attzs).
She goes through the progress of what materials you need to make a painting of your own, with the inspiration being not what the painting depicts as the focus but who you can share it with and the connections that may follow.
Screenshot of Tate Lates project
The video is not only full of great tips and techniques that you can use to create your own artwork. But even if you do not end up painting yourself, even just watching the video I found meditative and relaxing.
If you need any inspiration for some fun and creative projects, Tate Late is a great place to start!
Words written by Sophie Reynolds
Images sourced from Google Images and Tate Lates: Night in