Sculpture Saturdays - Book now - Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop

Sculpture Saturdays are a series of bookable workshops designed for families to make, play and work together.

The workshops will be led by various artists, who have been invited to create specific games, objects or tools for participants to interact with in our new outdoor learning studios. Several of these artists will also be presenting their work in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival.

We will be running 2 workshops a day for 4 families at a time, so when you book you can choose either morning or afternoon unless otherwise stated. The workshops are designed for primary school aged children and their families.

All our workshops will take place outside, so please remember to come dressed for the weather. Spaces are limited.

All workshops are free, donations welcome on the day. You can book for any of the workshops through eventbrite see links below.

Print it Out with Adam Benmakhlouf
Saturday 24 July
11am-12.30pm or 2pm-3.30pm
Book for Print it Out with Adam Banmakhlouf

Come along to Print it Out with your family and get hands-on printmaking with artist Adam Benmakhlouf, who will guide you through the processes of how you can use things like colour, shapes and texture to express emotions and ideas and get your own family mini design agency up and running for the time you are here. We will help you get started by giving you some imaginative prompts to chat about what you feel and think about school/work/dinner/the world. At the end of the workshop we’ll put up the prints on a large magnetic wall to make an epic fridge door of what everyone has been talking and printing about!

Adam Benmakhlouf is an artist, writer and educator. Enthusiastically multimedia, their work comprises visions of transformative justice and new ways of living with and loving each other.

Image: Documentation of Screenprinting Workshop at Timespan Cultural Institution, Helmsdale. Artists’ Own

Intergalactic Play Devices with Play Radical
Saturday 31 July
11am-12.30pm or 2pm-3.30pm
Book for Intergalactic Play Devices with Play Radical

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop was given some communication devices made by children from an alien planet. The children invented them so they could show and tell each other things like what they found beautiful, fun and scary. The children no longer need them, so they sent them to us but without any instructions!

Join Play Radical with your family to find out how you might use and play with these devices to communicate with each other.

Max Alexander aka Play Radical is a play worker and artist based in Scotland. Max enjoys drawing, making and collaborating with others to create inclusive play spaces for children, young people and adults. Max’s work often focuses on creating space for neurodivergent play and culture.

Image: Play Radical, Drawing for a prompt.

Plot your dream garden with Alaya Ang & Hussein Mitha
Saturday 7 & 14 August
11am-12.30pm or 2pm-3.30pm
Book for Plot your dream gardent with Alaya Ang & Hussein Mitha

Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha’s audio commission plotting (against) the garden can be heard in ESW’s Beacon Tower and this workshop takes gardens and nature as its starting point.

For their workshop they will invite you and your family on a short nature walk around the cycle paths. During the walk you will be spotting and recording the local plants, herbs and the flowers that you see. Back at ESW’s courtyard you will then ‘plot your dream garden’ inspired by your walk. Cutting your own shapes and designs from coloured vinyl we will use these to cover the walls, floors and columns to make a collaborative collage that grows across the Sculpture Workshop’s courtyard.

Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha are artists based in Glasgow who have a shared interest in gardens and decolonization. In their artistic investigation, ‘Plotting (against) the Garden’, they are working through research and with groups of people to find ways of unearthing communal plant knowledge and creating other systems of meaning through dreaming and imaginative practices of gardening.

Image: Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha gardening. Artists’ Own.

What are we doing when we aren’t doing anything? with Andrew Gannon
Saturday 21 August
11am-12.30pm or 2pm-3.30pm
Book for What are we doing when we aren’t doing anything? with Andrew Gannon

During this workshop we will be making live works using our own bodies and objects together, with your family, around the question:

What are we doing when we aren’t doing anything?

Working with each other (literally) we will consider how much we can take away and how little we can get away with doing whilst making art. Humour and failure will be our guide as we make live works that exist only for the moment.

Andrew Gannon’s exhibition Eccentric Limbs can be seen in the Hawthorvale space at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.

Andrew Gannon lives and works in Edinburgh and has been a studio holder at ESW since 2015. Previous exhibitions include Stand Up!, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2015) No Reading No Cry! Museum of the City of Skopje, Macedonia, (2015) and Slight Works, part of Open Out, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, (2018).

Image: Andrew Gannon, Proposed Work with Lounger, 2018.

Paper Clay Play with Ashleen Lewis
Saturday 28 August
11am-12.30pm or 2pm-3.30pm
Book for Paper Clay Play with Ashleen Lewis

This workshop is designed specifically for young people with Autism or additional support needs and their families.

During this workshop families will be shown how to mix their own, coloured paper clay. We will explore armature construction and techniques for using paper clay to make a collaborative family sculpture.

Ashleen Lewis is a Canadian visual artist based in Edinburgh. She has experience working with and running art workshops for children and adults with cognitive differences including Autism and Dementia.

Image: Documentation from SatARTday workshop, 2020. Image by Juliana Capes.

Mind-Mirror, Mind’s Eye with Naomi Garriock
Saturday 4 September
11am-11.30am/ 11.45am-12.15pm/ 12.30pm-1pm/ 1.15pm-1.45pm/ 2.30pm-3pm/ 3.15pm-3.45pm/
4pm-4.30pm
Book for Mind-Mirror, Mind’s Eye with Naomi Garriock

Join artist Naomi Garriock who will introduce you to the Mind’s Eye booth, a colour mixing live broadcast that is brought to you by a family of hands. Inside, you can touch but not see, outside, you can see but not touch. Working together as a family you will harness the powers of sight and touch in this intergenerational plasticine painting puzzle that you can exhibit on the ESW magnetic wall or take home to stick on your fridge!

Audio description will be available.

Please note there are several booking slots for this workshop for one family at a time. Each family will have a 30 minute slot.

Naomi Garriock makes paintings and activities with others, themselves in the-act-of making art. Her work draws from the pictorial language of art education books and how-to instruction videos.

Image: Mind-Mirror, Mind’s Eye, 2021. Artists’ own.