OPEN LEARNING 2 – Documenting the Edinburgh Sculpture Studio Tour

This week’s main course was a visit to the Edinburgh Sculpture Studio. There are two main sections: a tour inside the Edinburgh studios and interviews with the artists in residence, and secondly, a taster of three art activities and initial exposure to the artists’ toolkits

The Edinburgh Sculpture Studio is a charitable artist’s studio that allows artists to rent studios and use the equipment they are equipped to create art at a low cost, which leads one to consider the possibility of a socially beneficial artist incubator being replicated on a global scale. However, the costs behind this are extremely high, not only in terms of the need for money, but also in terms of the level of humanistic artistic development within the region.

The first step was a tour of the entire studio, which is divided into two main sections: a courtyard full of sculptures and a main working building. The sculpture studio is very well equipped and offers a wide variety of workshops and equipment for the artists to work in, but the triangular building outside the courtyard, which looks like a tower, was the one that caught my attention. The narrow, enclosed interior was so relaxing that I would probably sit on a bench inside every day and meditate if I could.

After the tour of the studio, we returned to the courtyard to experience three different creative games. The first was to experiment with different fruits to create different textures on the surface of the clay and end up with a clay piece of your own. The second was a kind of video where the group worked together to complete a story description, but as there were only two of us when I experienced this activity I didn’t get a full sense of what the game was about. The third was making wooden pieces and as my grandfather used to be a carpenter I was very interested in this game and took a video of the whole thing to record it.