Introduction – Not Hopeless But Dangerous

Image Description: A banner in rainbow gradient showing the words ‘Not Hopeless but Dangerous’, with a well-dressed fox holding a pencil bursting through the middle of the word ‘dangerous’, against a background of various crafting tools.

Introduction

Day 1

A foreword from Yishay

Many people are experiencing strong feelings these days. It may be from the news and the violence depicted graphically in it, it may be in the violence that is in our own homes. It may be facing another winter unable to afford heating or less and less food compared to other winters.

This course, this seven day course/workshop, engages with those feelings, and uses them. We are artists. We don’t have the luxury to waste strong feelings. Those feelings are valuable energy, and focusing on that core can create incredible art, and not just that – as aritsts we are not limited. There are no rules to art except for the artwork to work – that’s it, there are no rules! There’s many years of learning technique, but that doesn’t mean that there are rules. It’s just, artwork works because it works. Sense doesn’t play, logic doesn’t play a huge role in it, it just needs to work.

This is the hope, that this course gives you tools to become what artists can, and many times are – which is, not helpless, not angry, but dangerous, effective in the world. Ideas cannot be stopped, but art can convey complexity that is not as easily accessible as written words.

And then, maybe perhaps, the goal of this course is to equip artists with the building blocks of creating art as a protest, to make the process more accessible, to encourage artists to be dangerous.

There are seven days in this course. Each day is an assignment, and each one builds; so the second day builds on the first day, the third day builds on the first and second days, all the way to the seventh day.

A WEEK TO DANGEROUS ART!

A foreword from WelshPixie

Creating this course with Yishay has been one of, perhaps the, most thrilling and exciting things I’ve done as Curator. Working with Yishay has been delightful and enlightening and unquantifiably inspirational; her wealth of practical knowledge gained through derring-do in the pursuit of liberation for all of us, for highlighting the gross injustices that exist in our world through photography and barbed wire and plexiglass and razors, at the cost of such things as radiation poisoning and kidnapping.

In the process of crafting this course Yishay would regale me with tales such as living on tiny remote islands picking seaweed on minefield-strewn beaches while helicopters flew overhead on their way to dropping live missiles, relayed to me very casually in our discussions on borders, on passports, on nation-states and militaries. The things Yishay has experienced in her life thus far are both terrifying and exhilarating, and all serve as the incredibly solid foundation from which this course is built.

The words that will inspire and motivate you in each lesson are all Yishay’s, sent to me in impassioned voice notes that I eagerly transcribed and arranged while becoming more and more excited for the whole that these seven days would coalesce into. The idea was jointly ours, but my non-administerial input was otherwise minimal; this course is, ultimately, Yishay’s gift to all of us.

How To Participate: