Earth dirt to cosmic dust
Alumni workshop with Liz K Miller, Melanie King and Catharine Cary

​On Tuesday 24th May some students from my year and I attended a workshop at Sion Hill, conducted by Liz K. Miller, Melanie King and Catharine Cary, called "Earthly dirt to cosmic dust".

We gathered in the seminar room in front of reception and we started the workshop practicing some meditation, after which, with the aid of some kitchen foil, we blocked the light from coming through any openings (windows, doors, cracks…) as best as we could, and then poked a little hole in one of them with the idea of turning the space into a massive pinhole camera, inside of which we would stand.

We tested the pinhole camera with a large piece of white paper and we saw that it worked well, as long as we held the paper in the correct angle, in front of the hole that we had done.

After completing this activity, we laid pieces of photographic paper on top of a desk and placed objects on top of them, such as paper clips and pieces of string and allowed the light to fall on them, so that the emulsion on photographic paper would react on the parts of the paper that were not covered, creating some small pieces in this way.

​While we allowed the natural light to work on these pieces of paper, we watched through the window as one of the alumni who was delivering the workshop, delivered a performance in the car park of the university, after which we started working on our own performance pieces:

We were given some pieces of A3 paper and some drawing materials and we were presented with some sounds, which we tried to draw on the pieces of paper. The performative part of the task consisted in reading other student's drawings and responding to them with an action that produced a sound.

After this, we had a look at the pieces on the desks and we collected them. Some of the results were quite unexpected.