Residencies at Goldsmith’s College (2013,2012, 2011)
Working with emerging artists on the body as the site of settlement; experimenting with location and dislocation and the visualisation of images of place.
Day workshop in Hackney for a local community group: exploring a new building and wanting to make themselves at home in it. (2013)
The Small Festival: As part of the arts activities at The Small Festival, creating a night-time settlement; a city of light (2009)
Residential weekends: In Malvern & Sussex (2009, 2010)
Exploring the meaning of place to us, and designing how we would like to live, in reality and in our imaginations.
Storytelling and place: Workshops (with family groups and with Theatre Students) to create a collective imaginary space and then to tell its story (2007-11)
If you are interested in a workshop or to develop some work with me
Contact me on sue_mayo@yahoo.co.uk
Feedback from participants
Workshops with Community groups
12 people aged 8-80+ took part in a Settlements Workshop at St Peter De Beauvoir Town, Hackney as part of a course exploring A Sense of Place. The event took place in a newly finished café and gallery space in St Peter’s Crypt. It was impossible not to take part. You didn’t have to be arty. We were presented with a vast array of small everyday objects – natural and manufactured – and invited to create imaginary places – on our own and in small groups. It was amazing to see what people made – the common themes of water, sacred sites, pathways, dwellings – some mythical, some futuristic. Looking at the settlements we had made, our own and each other’s made us all quietly happy.
Workshops with artist and performers
Thinking about making a place that showed how I would like to live allowed me to creatively explore, but more than that, practically establish what I needed at a basic human level, rather than what I thought I might like. Once I finished moulding my vision using my hands I realised what mattered to me. What mattered in my mind prior was very different to what mattered to me in the present, in a practical real sense.
Workshops using the body as the site of the settlement
• I witnessed bodies and objects in dialogue leaving traces scattered through spaces
• I experienced listening to objects and finding responses with my body
• I understood/experienced the responsibility of using my body as land, holding structures on my foundation, and consequently understood more about my own mass and existence.
• I witnessed cities crumbling, dissipating, and reforming under the rise and fall of bodies breathing
Residential weekend workshop
Just wanted to say thank you for a really lovely weekend. So many bits of it keep coming back to me to think about. I loved making things, and arranging things, and playing with objects – and through that, understanding some things I hadn’t realised about my creative process, which is fascinating. And I really valued having space to look at where I am and where I like to live etc – I’ve got such a strong picture of me now living in a set of East meets West, middle ages meets modernity towers, perched perilously on a cliff – with a soft, fluffy area to escape to from time to time. It was strange how on that first evening when you gave us a box of objects, and in my mind they became a story about a bad king and the people who escaped to the forest – then when I looked back I realised that my perfect place was once more based on a precipice and that I had rescued the brass weight-tower thing (which at the time I had rejected as uninteresting) and it had become one of my exotic towers, and that although I still wanted the soft space in the forest to be there, it was the hustle of the city I yearned for, that I wanted to live among, a city of a hundred towers and a hundred tongues. Strange how things reveal themselves to us.