Feb. 21, 2024 — BurlingtonGreen

BurlingtonGreen is hosting a hands-on workshop on Feb. 29 at the Art Gallery of Burlington, where participants will create dioramas with upcycled “life scraps.”

This free event is aimed at those aged 55 or over, though all ages are welcome. It begins at 1 p.m. and runs until 4 p.m.

Artist instructor Alison Thompson will lead the workshop, guiding participants in creating tiny expressive worlds with our daily waste and thinking in new ways about our relationship with the items we consume.

Let’s think in a new way about our waste — by reclaiming and reconsidering it through art making. Creating beauty or curiosity can be a way to process our relationship to the items we consume on a daily basis.

Location: Art Gallery of Burlington, 1333 Lakeshore Road, Burlington (Visitor Information)

Pre-registration required
Pre-registration required using this sign up form or by calling 905-975-5563.

All ages event, with preference for those age 55+. Space is limited.

Please bring your gathered waste and a sense of adventure in art making! 
Small boxes will be provided for the diorama making.

Some materials will be provided and participants are welcome to bring waste materials from their daily activities to be decorated, dissected, and reconstructed into tiny dioramas. We will rework these materials with printing, drawing, folding, cutting, and collage methods as we construct wild worlds within discarded small boxes (provided).

More information for participants
Participants are asked to bring their own waste.

The following is a list of suggested items to consider: packaging, old mail, paper or plastic shopping bags, take out containers, tags and tickets, notes, homework pages, catalogues and magazines, buttons, twist ties, bread tags, twine and or yarn, string, scrap fabric, lint balls, paint swatches, stamps, and whatever else you can imagine!

Please note this workshop is held in a community space and we ask that items be cleaned prior to bringing in. No stinky messy trash, please and thank you.

Workshop organizers will have a pile of clean waste to share as well.

About the artist/instructor
Alison Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist raising children (4 and 9), in Tkaronto. Her work has appeared in Toronto, Hamilton, Guelph, Halifax, Charlottetown, PEI, and Brooklyn, NY.

The parameters for making art that Alison inherited from her university experiences at OCADU and the University of Guelph have been exploded in a beautiful way as she includes child and caregiving activity as necessary influences on her work. Alison has spent the past nine years being slow and studying the curious pathways that this shift has caused in her approach to creating. The result of this experience is an arsenal of new relationships to materials, techniques and ways of thinking that are directing her process.

During the past four years, under the influence of all the scrap paper waste from family life, Alison has found herself pushing at the boundaries of her painting and reaching for collage as a solution. Currently, her practice involves lots of collage, mini art books, and drawing. In 2017, after a year of participating in Lenka Clayton’s Artist in Residence in Motherhood, Alison joined forces with Sarah Cullen to build and grow MOTHRA the Artist Parent Project. She is most pleased to witness the community it has become.

Covid safety note: masks are welcome for this touch-free activity. Please follow Halton Public Health guidance on Covid symptoms or exposure and the Art Gallery of Burlington’s COVID-19 Updates & Visitor Guidelines.

This all-ages event is part of BurlingtonGreen’s Green Connections with Older Adults program, which is supported by the Halton Region Community Investment Fund.