Invisible Picture Palace: Immersive Workshop
A location-based workshop that begins with sound and ends with an audio-visual takeover of space.
Image from Invisible Threads: The Art of Audio Puppetry, XMTR Festival 2024
Suitable for both professionals and beginners, this is an artistic learning experience using sound, spoken word and experimental puppetry. Together we create a collective performance and original artwork that transforms the space. Through the workshop, participants explore webs of memory and inner experience: invisible threads that connect us through space and time.
“Genuinely life changing”
“Mesmerising. I didn’t want to leave.”
“My favourite event of the festival”
Responses to Invisible Threads: the Art of Audio Puppetry, XMTR Audio Arts Festival, September 2024.
Finally, the lights are dimmed and the texts are performed while a collective shadow sculpture is assembled. Images begin to creep around the space. The workshop turns into an immersive experience as our inner worlds collaborate and become part of the physical landscape.
Example read text (produced by Georgia Walker in a sound workshop, 2022). Note: For this workshop a collaborative performance method is used so that multiple live readings interweave.
Artist: Nina Garthwaite
The workshop is designed and run by Nina Garthwaite, an artist with roots in sound and branches in animation, printmaking and shadow puppetry. Nina has run events, workshops and installations worldwide exploring sound, space and the imagination. She has created work for well known institutions including The Barbican, The British Libary, The Welcome Collection and The BBC. She has also taught creative and experimental audio for 6 years where she uses original devising methods to help new makers explore sound imaginatively. Nina is the founder and director of In The Dark, an organisation that celebrates storytelling through sound. Her essay “Imagining Together” was recently published in The Routledge Companion to the Sound of Space (2024).
What I’m Looking For:
Spaces that could be meaningfully transformed by this workshop for example:
- liminal spaces in arts and other community venues
- spaces looking to be re-ensouled e.g. unused or empty rooms or buildings
- contentious or divisive spaces
- ignored outdoor crevices
Partners from varied disciplines – artistic and other – to explore the potential of this workshop together. This could be by:
- exploring how the same devising method could lead to other types of spatial art e.g. through music or movement
- exploring the interdisciplinary dimentions of this workshop e.g. health-giving benefits, facilitating dialogue around our built environment
- reaching communities outside traditional art spaces
- asssistance with lighting design to facilitate the workshop work in a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces
- feedback to hone the workshop for a public audience
Related past projects:
https://www.barbican.org.uk/s/soundhouse/
https://www.barbican.org.uk/s/thelisteningbody/
I am the founder and director of In The Dark, an arts organisation that celebrates creative storytelling through sound. We’ve held nearly 300 events worldwide in venues from cinemas and theatres to boats and cemetaries. Through In The Dark I have extensive experience of holding events for the public and leading groups to make something creative happen together. I also teach creative audio through the In The Dark School.
Experiments from DYCP Grant “Animating Sound” (2022-23):
My DYCP grant was instrumental in enabling me to combine sound with visual art. This workshop feels like the next step, allowing me to connect activities I have previously done in sound with new ideas in visual art, in particular through the use of silhoutte and abstract puppetry as featured in these short experimental films.