Wood: Structures and Stages

Catalog description

This course situates wood within the context of Collaborative Arts' interdisciplinary environment where making, performance, and critical inquiry intersect. Taking on a DIY approach, students will engage with wood on a hands-on level, confronting its material resistance and learning from its demands. Working with wood cultivates decision-making, adaptability, and sensitivity to material feedback - skills that are essential not only in art-making but also in live performance. The goal is to expand students' perception of wood and its potential for creating various constructions and objects in relation to our bodies. We will explore structural building form and how its scale, shape, and removal creates various weight-bearing structures - from chairs and tables to shelves, stages, lofts, and houses. We will learn to cut straight, curved, holes, and internal shapes utilizing tools such as hand saw, band saw, jig saw, chop saw, drill press, and circular saw. We will learn to join materials together with nail, screw, hardware, lamination techniques using drills, hammers, and clamps. The semester culminates in a final performance that synthesizes learned techniques with individual artistic inquiry, and emphasizes the inseparable relationship between form, concept, and content through self-made wooden structures and stages.