Survey II artist Saelia Aparicio will develop an artist-led curriculum for the next Associates programme and the curriculum created will be embedded across the entire school, which sees both Young Associates, Associates and Despacito Art School working more closely together.
Saelia will form a curriculum that explores and thinks about their figure of the hybrid: a recurring form for exploration on the themes, experiences and perspectives on natural environments and the Anthropocene, counter culture and science fiction, biomimicry, fluidity, organisms and ecosystems. Associates will look at the environment as a sentient being and landscape, with empathy and consideration that becomes integrated and reflects into Associates individual and collective art practice and production methods.
About Saelia:
Saelia’s work explores paradoxical spaces found inside the normal and every day, working across many art forms including; functional sculpture, murals, glass blowing, large scale installation and natural materials.
Saelia’s broad practice has a deep environmental consciousness that questions the relationship between humans and the planet earth’s natural world through a post binary science fiction lens. Hybrid figures and familiar objects with ambiguous purposes are told geometrically and organically as materiality mutates itself in a cross disciplinary practice.
Working with animation and science fiction styles alongside ceramic effigies, textiles and living plant life, their artworks journey through the body and into altered spaces, digesting and reforming consumptive cultures to compost them and grow weird new stuff that is transcendent and enticing.
Recent exhibitions include; Survey II, Site Gallery, Sheffield. Jerwood Space, London. G39, Cardiff. 2021-2022; Testament, Goldsmith CCA, London 2022; The New Figuration curated by Glenn Adamson, Friedman Benda, New York 2022.
About Open School East:
Established in 2013 and located in Margate, Open School East is a free, independent art school and community space that focuses on collective learning through the arts. OSE supports cultural practitioners at an early stage of their career to develop and sustain their practice, and enable young people and adults alike to learn new and transferable skills, develop their confidence and shape their creative voice by becoming active learners and co-producers of OSE’s programmes.
Find out more:
Read about the course and how to apply, here.
Read about Survey II, here.
