The Archaeology of the Self: A Four Week Arts Course in Creative Exploration with Artist Eleanor Crook, Live on Zoom
SUNDAYS April 11, 18, 25 and May 2
6 - 8 pm New York EST / 11 pm - 1 am London UK time / 12 midnight - 2 am Brussels Europe time
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

Picture this: Under the surface of our daily life and thoughts lies a labyrinth of treasuries of ideas, images and visions which our culture keeps hidden. If we could only excavate this and explore freely, our creative and emotional lives would expand and flourish. Our subconscious mind is full of surprises, curiosities and forgotten dreams.

This course offers creative techniques, mixed media making, readings, films, prompts and experiences which uncover the self  like an archaeological site, in the belief that under the surface our personalities are linked and a group experience of unearthing our hidden imaginations will achieve more than solitary explorations.

Your guides in this underground adventure will be Eleanor Crook, sculptor and longtime friend of Morbid Anatomy, and the spirit of Carl Jung whose theories of the Collective Unconscious, the Instincts and the Archetypes serve as  rich and mysterious drivers for artistic and psychological development. 

Lectures and homework and art demonstrations will draw on museums and their online collections which offer special access to humanity’s creativity: those energies, superstitions, anxieties and preoccupations that we share with other humans however remote from us in geography or time. We will generate  collage, 3d collage, drawing, painting and journaling. Each week we will make (or draw, write, photograph, film an artifact based on a Jungian concept, leading to the final session where we will present a personal collection of the resulting made and found treasures, a self-portrait as a cabinet of curiosities. 

The course will be led by Eleanor Crook, sculptor and mixed-media artist whose background in Classics, anatomy, art history and chiefly making, put her in a position to guide others on a personal quest to synthesize the personal with  broader human creativity. The course is tailored to the participants and the only necessary qualification is curiosity and the urge to create and express. Imagination and symbolism, surrealism and the more mysterious aspects of generating imagery, are all welcomed!

COURSE ACTIVITIES

• Automatic and spirit drawing & painting / modelling

• Journalling with words and images and shapes

• Demo by Eleanor of 2d and 3d collage 

• Making personal objects inspired by Carl Jung’s memoirs, creations and building 

• Film recommendations  of some dreamlike classic works (Cocteau, Tarkovsky, the Brothers Quay, Jodorovsky)

• Relating your personal interests and history to cultural and historical artifacts

• Generating hand made and digital images and artifacts, to reconnect with the power of making. 

• Final presentation of your personal curious cabinet / altar and online drinks 

• Focus on accessing the wellsprings of creativity and imagery, clearing blocks, developing confidence and expression.

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and wax modeler who works between the UK and several international medical museums. She is an art tutor a number of UK's major art schools and an art educator in various European medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam. Her work is in the collections of the Science Museum London, Gordon Museum of Pathology Guy's Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her specialism is handmade effigies, baroque bronze and eerie lifelike waxes.