3D Lab Guest Sessions are online technical talks or collaborative workshops hosted by the 3D Lab based at Wimbledon College of Arts. We seek conversations that reflect the richness of thinking through making, technical research and development, and practical learning and teaching. We aim to provide a learning resource and develop an archive for a community keen to articulate tacit knowledge and making literacies that underpin making practice.
If you’d like to join our mailing list to be notified of our next session please email us at wca3Dlab@arts.ac.uk with 3D Lab Guest Sessions in the subject. UAL staff and students can also access these sessions on our Streams channel here.
“I had a blast exploding work all over my studio for the WCA 3D Lab discussion with Ashleigh Pearson and @wimbledonual […] Always nice to revisit and reconsider old work and see how the dots are connecting as we move forward. […] thank you to Ashleigh for putting together a really valuable forum for creativity and making, and for inviting me to participate.” – Ameet Hindocha
“Each event emphasises ‘the richness of thinking through making’. I cannot stress how valuable these conversations are for anyone that feels like an outsider peering into this wonderful world of experimenting, fiddling, handling, thinking, creating, arriving at answers through the physicality of making. […] The talks felt like a warm, supportive breeze; reminding me of the three years I spent at Wimbledon. I felt right at home, strangely, like I was able to return to the college for a brief interval post-graduation. Ashleigh is the most phenomenal host and maker, from the introductions at the start of each session to the questions raised afterwards – the open discussions showered me with ideas that have been truly valuable.” – Yulin Huang
Clare Mitten
This session explores the common threads of making, process, materiality, and play within the roles Clare traverses as a maker, gallery coordinator, educator, and more recently trainee art psychotherapist. In her role as maker, Clare’s work exemplifies ‘thinking through making’, with objects being physical thought diagrams, continuous prototypes in nature, symbolic of process and the potential for everyday materials to transcend their humble origins to be vehicles of cognitive research or tools to make sense of real and imagined narratives.
Session 3
Hosting Space // Enabling Practice
A series of three online Dialogues events co-created with Wimbledon’s 3D Lab.
Session 3 showcases the ‘Sound.Make.Light.Play’ workshop and the Film Theory sessions at Wimbledon College of Art and their emergent pedagogy. Exploring the shift from provider/problem solver to enabler or host and providing scaffolding for new activities / knowledge to emerge with whatever the materials and tools are to hand.
Session 2
Embodied Practice // Disembodied Spaces
A series of three online Dialogues events co-created with Wimbledon’s 3D Lab. Session 2 shares the grappling with teaching embodied practice online, thinking through tacit knowledge and experimenting with how best to transfer making principles in an accessible, playful and engaging way; empowering students to be intuitive makers where they are, experimenting, talking into the void, trial and error.
Session 1
Making Sense // Making Literacies
A series of three online Dialogues events co-created with Wimbledon’s 3D Lab.
Session 1 is a panel discussion reflecting collectively upon the shift in thinking and doing around design and making practice; on new practices emerging from responding to the constant change in the learning landscape, by exploring what embodied making looks like in a disembodied online environment and the hybrid blended environment.
Barney Heywood
Stand + Stare develops innovative and beautifully-crafted ways to share stories that combine digital and physical experiences. Their work spans commissions within the heritage and museum sector, one-of-a-kind experiences for commercial clients, academic collaborations and direct engagement with local communities. Their projects connect people through multi-sensory experiences in the form of interactive exhibits, apps, performances and workshops. They make work that is accessible, creating shared experiences that a whole community can enjoy.
Arantza Vilas
The session unfolds the trajectory of Arantza’s studio, Pinaki Studios, in developing textiles for costumes for Film and TV as well as interiors and projects on food design, all underpinned by an ongoing exploration of the passage of time and its patina on surfaces. Arantza shares her playful approach to the possibilities of textiles, materials and processes which has most recently led to research into colour from food waste and pleated electronic textiles affiliated to the Wearable Computing Team at UdK (Berlin).
William Waterhouse
Will kicked off our very first 3D Lab Guest Session back in 2019 as part of his solo show, ‘Epic Win’ in the Wimbledon Space Gallery. For this session we ask Will to revisit this body of work over a year later by way of a springboard to unearthing his playful but highly considered approach to making. Will masterfully invites you into the wonder and awe of making whilst generously exposing how the magic is made in the earnest desire that you too might be enthralled as much as he.
Ameet Hindocha
We talk to designer, artist and educator Ameet Hindocha about his passion for geometry. He is a nationally and internationally sought after specialist in the creative exploration of geometry. We discuss geometry as a fundamental making literacy, as the framework often underpinning the physical world around us and its vast applications in design and making.
Forster & Heighes
The 3D Lab has enjoyed lively and pertinent discussions about making and the making environment with Ewan and Chris before, during and after their recent residency at Wimbledon. We’re excited to share with you a continuation of these conversations and in particular how they use the language and practice of making to shape and compositionally inform their work and their approach to performance.
Links mentioned in this session:
Speculation in Unimagined Space podcast
Trig Point map
Oscar Peters
We talk to Oscar, live from Amsterdam,
about his recent project Volta at the Electriciteitsfabriek in the Hague. Oscar uses kinetics and mechanics to explore violence, humor, the perfomative nature of objects and our interaction with them. Jonathan Armistead joins us to discuss making as an embodied process, material as performative and how Oscar attempts to democratize making in all aspects of his practice as a maker and educator.
Alexander Walmsley
We talk to Alexander Walmsley, a Virtual Reality (VR) artist and developer specialising in the creation of immersive and interactive experiences. Alexander generously shared, live from Berlin, about his recent project Stade 1620, the multiplicity of narrative in VR, the material research behind historical reconstruction and translating the physical world into an immersive digital environment.