Arts & Entertainment, Design & Style
Passion Projects
Lesson time 12:00 min
Es breaks down some of her creations and explains that the works she makes normally emerge out of a worldbuilding process. Sometimes these worlds exist already, as the words in a script. At other times, they need to be constructed from scratch.
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Topics include: Passion Projects • "The Poem Pavilion" • "I Saw The World End" • Designing For Nations
Teaches Turning Ideas Into Art
Designer and artist Es Devlin teaches you her approach to creating powerful visual stories and cultivating creativity in any form.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] Over the past five years, a significant change has taken place for me. For much of my practice, my role has been to bring someone else's text to life. But now, I'm beginning to generate my own projects as a solo exhibiting artist. - One of the things I want to mention to you is, if you are an artist or a designer who works in applied art or applied design. If you are used to working to a brief. If you are used to responding to a primary text, whatever that might be. Why don't you like I did, take that little step out of your comfort zone and try to make work without a brief? You may already be someone who works without a brief, in which case I applaud you. It took me years to dare to do so. But just give yourself a Saturday afternoon and say, what would my brief be if I were to write my own brief if I weren't responding to something that somebody else asked me to do? And what I found was, I was somewhat like a creature that walks around the edge of the room too scared to come into the middle. I needed my systems my process. And my process is reading and research. When I started making my own work, I used that same process. I read books. I am fascinated at the moment as many of us are with books around the environment ecopsychology, ecophilosophy books. There's so much to read. There's so much to learn around how do we change our minds? What does it take to shift from being the person that contributes to the problem to being someone who helps contribute to the solution? What kind of mental shift do we need to go through? Because we're all complicit in it. So I read these books. There's an array of them around here. And one of the things I learned from Timothy Morton it wasn't actually in this book, "Hyperobjects," it was in a speech that he gave. And he said, I've got a kind of manifesto for artists who want to get involved in this space and want to help. And my advice to them is, preaching hasn't really got us where we need to be. In fact, preaching might have contributed to the problem. So how about we don't preach to people to change their behavior, but we try to amaze them into changing their behavior. And that was really his invitation to artists. Please amaze us. Amaze us into perspective shift, into behavioral shift. And actually, when you do genuinely amaze people when you blow people's minds, for a minute they stop behaving like they usually behave. For a minute they believe in magic. For a minute, they believe that things might be possible, they might be different, and maybe they can change. And if you can just get people into that state of, well this looks like magic. So maybe something else is possible. Well, this looks like magic, so maybe anything's possible. So that's the invitation that I was given by Timothy Morton. And I extend it now to you. What if you were to amaze us into changing our minds? [MUSIC PLAYING] ES DEVLIN: I was invited to enter a competition by the Britis...
About the Instructor
For more than 20 years, Es Devlin has sculpted immersive experiences for opera, drama, and performers like Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, The Weeknd, and U2. Now the artist and designer shares her process so you can cultivate creativity in any form. From sketching to collaborating to creating powerful visual stories, learn how to turn the abstract—your ideas and imagination—into art you can see, feel, and share.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Es Devlin
Designer and artist Es Devlin teaches you her approach to creating powerful visual stories and cultivating creativity in any form.
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