The students of Art Foundation programme at Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar (VCU-Q) were asked to probe these questions and come up with answers in drawings and sketches. The consequent inquiry by the students culminated in a stunning exhibition around the idea of domestic landscape.
Professor Payne says the project also provided the opportunity to the students to learn more about their home culture.
Jesse Payne, the Assistant Professor Art Foundation Department, VCU-Q, directed the first-year students in the art studio to pursue inquiries around personal objects and experiment with various mark-making techniques in order to translate domestic experiences into their work.
“We are asking our students to investigate about what home means to them. Whether home is a place, a physical space, a mental space or something that exists where family is?” Prof Payne tells Community in chat at the opening of the exhibition of the students’ work titled ‘Home’ at the HBKU Student Centre gallery recently.
Rama Duwaji stands by her intricate design.
The body of work represents a different approach to drawing around the meaning of home from a diverse and multicultural perspective. “Some students are looking at it from a very physical point of view in choosing an object that they feel gives them a sense of home while others are thinking about it in terms of a mental space and a sentimental type of object that they feel reminds them of home,” the professor explains.
Visitors appreciating the works of participating students.
The students were asked to look at a number of different objects in a critical way and think about the importance of those objects in their lives. Many came up with objects that are very much related to local culture.
Others had more ambiguous and open to interpretation kind of works. These difficult-to-decipher drawings put a challenge in for the viewer to investigate. In the exhibition, Prof Payne says, it becomes a relationship between that object and the viewer standing in front of it at that moment.
“The object in the drawing challenges the viewers to put themselves in relationship with each one of the objects and decipher it, thinking about what home means to various people in this culture,” says the art professor.
Some of objects in the drawings come from the local culture.
One wall of the exhibition gallery is covered with dozens of smaller drawings and sketches. The smaller works are a way to introduce students to the learning objectives related to the project at an early stage in a very experimental fashion. The purpose was to make them work with the media and learn the smaller details that were crucial for them to understand how to make the larger works.
Every student’s work, from almost 70 students in the first-year, is represented in the exhibition in smaller drawings. The larger ones were curated by a group of people working with HBKU Student Centre such as Abdulla al-Emadi and Elise Boileau, besides the art foundation faculty of VCU-Q.
Professor Payne guided the project with his plan to get the students thinking critically and creatively in terms of the types of objects that they wanted to draw, having them question the idea of home. The larger drawings, twice the size of others in the show, involves different processes where students had to do rubbings, a process of putting a piece of paper over the top of texture and rubbing a marking medium like charcoal to get the texture of the underlying object to come through the paper.
Hana Elleithy stood out with her drawing. She was able to accomplish a very ornate and intricate texture throughout the entire surface of the drawing paper and used that as a base to draw her object on top of it.
“This object is an oil bottle because I like oil paint and this is my first oil bottle. I had this old book cover which I was using for rubbing but at the end of the project I did a stencil of that book so that I could place the stencil on top of and behind the drawing and then erase and add charcoal,” Hana tells Community.
Her colleague, Rama Duwaji, came up with an equally intricate design. “I made this using charcoal and white pastel. It is really a small ring made out of wood that I made when I was a child. It was important to me because it was from my grandmother’s house in Syria which I do not go to anymore,” says Rama.
Rama managed in her drawing to disintegrate the objects and push them into the background space and let others emerge out through the use of mark-making technique.
It was intentional, she says. “I basically covered the leaves with water and the paste made of charcoal and water and pressed it like a stamp and I thought the link between the wood and the leaves would be very organic and natural,” she explains.
Students were asked to make inquiries into what the idea of home is to them.
The drawing made her realise the extent of her skills and she intends to pursue her majors in drawing and design.
In the first year they are not usually doing things that they have done before. So charcoal, which is the media of almost everything in the exhibition, is something that they have never handled before.
In their first year, the students are accomplishing things they did not know they can make before they came into VCU-Q, says Prof Payne. It is not because the instructions are magical but because they are in a system where they are being asked to really push the boundaries.
Rama thinks art starts off natural but at a certain stage you have to keep experimenting and practising different techniques to really push yourself and that is where training comes in. Being in VCU-Q helped her in forcing herself to think out of the box.
Hana says it made her realise her mistakes and improve her techniques.
“I would always draw and I actually use charcoal at home, it is my favourite medium but the thing is that I would repeat the same style of drawing with different objects over and over but my mistakes would always stand out in the same way so I would never really knew,” she explains.
“I did not have someone to direct me. Now there is a lot of improvement in how I see things and in the techniques I use,” she adds, referring to her foundation course.
Professor Payne says the project also provided the opportunity to the students to learn more about their home culture and where they came from. A lot of critical thinking skills that we proposed and lot of creative skills that are developed in the project can translate into any majors that they would have but also into students’ lives.
Professor Payne says the project also provided the opportunity to the students to learn more about their home culture.
