With London in lockdown due to the Covid19 pandemic the studio visits and meetings, like much else, moved online. Devised specially for a Zoom meeting Louise Ashcroft ran a brilliant writing workshop. Each of the Associates was asked to look at documentation of each other’s work and write a short piece on it. Louise’s introduction summed it up perfectly:
“My aim is to make this a fun few hours of power-writing about each other’s work, so that at the end everyone has a bunch of different perspectives on their practice which they can use to reflect and maybe to inform their own writing of applications/proposals/statements.
Please reply all to this email with a link to your website or any other way we can see your work online. It might help to pick out one or two keys works.
Everyone will write about everyone and send the texts to each other.
Sometimes it’s easier to write about others’ work than our own, so let’s use each other’s brains. We’ll make it fun and will have a short break half way through.
Feel free to make yourself a cocktail or cuppa while you work, snacks also encouraged. Don’t worry if you find writing hard, we’ll make it accessible and enjoyable. It’s easy to forget that words are liberating and even the most luxurious rare ones cost nothing, so let’s make the most of them”.
The relative ease of writing about other’s work, compared to writing about your own, helped everyone to realise that it can be a thing to enjoy, and that some of that enjoyment, or at least a less inhibited approach, can be found and made to benefit writing about your own work.
