A jewellery course by Ruudt Peters assistant Estela Saez
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August 9-15th, 2010
Ravenstein – The Netherlands
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Every year I recieve the information about the summer course of Ruudt Peters it reminds me at the extraordinary time I spend in Ravenstein with the course Fly Now. In the press information of this year Ruudt Peters sends the report I wrote at the end of the course. After another reading I have to consider I can’t find any better words yet to discribe what the experience with Ruudt Peters and Ravenstein meant to me. So I publish it once again at the end of this post.
After the successes of the last years, this year Ruudt Peters is beginning his workshop under the title mOve nOw. Peters has been connected as professor at two of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Konstfack University of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm. Through Opere Summer School he follows up his teaching with a private programme intended for students or graduates of art academies and artists/designers who seek to deepen their work. Every year an international group of jewellery makers participate in his workshops.
Theme
The workshop mOve nOw is being held in the countryside of the southern Netherlands. mOve nOw is a workshop where you learn to discover the movement of creativity. Every human being operates from an inner drive which generates strength, energy, movement and leads to your form language. It is essential for an artist to draw from this force. Together we will search for your personal move. This means that you will get in contact with yourself, and learn to focus on your personal drive. We will guide you to your basic experience, learn you to formulate your own positions, and support you in translating this into making jewellery. mOve nOw is about taking another movement at our contemporary experience of making, a statement about how you can relate to your own driving force. Artists and students are stimulated to produce work around this idea. In doing so, it is important that not only rational reflection, but also the subconscious enters into the work process. Ultimately, jewellery remains a frame of reference.
The mOve nOw course is built on step-by-step education in which the end product is not the most important goal. “The goal is the means and the means is the goal” (M. Gandhi). The emphasis lies on personal guidance and development. The participants are given the tools with which to continue this process on their own. By means of direct action people learn to take steps. During the course the group will cook together, and there will be group discussions.
Dates: August 9-15, 2010
The course starts Monday 9th August 2010, 10.00 hrs
The course ends Saturday 14th August 2010, after dinner
Place: Summer studio, Ravenstein.
Accommodations: 2 / 4 person rooms, St. Laurenshoeve, Ravenstein.
Price: Including accommodation, meals, insurance and VAT: € 1600,–
Report of Gie Luyten – Workshop Fly Now 2007
One flew over the jewellery’s nest
I heard someone saying: I must find a material I’d like to work with, but I can’t find a special one! What kind of material you think about at THIS very moment? Ruudt Peters asked. It’s all dust I think about! Okay, you want dust, then you can have dust! As a hurricane Ruudt flew over and between the artists and their working tables, rushed to a place in the studio where all kinds of instruments and materials were stored, pulled with both hands the large overfilled sack out of the vacuum cleaner, flew back as a helicopter with the sack of dust above his head and let it gently land on the lady’s shoulders while he folded it, as a wealthy necklace, around the head of a queen while he said with a heavy voice: You asked for dust my dear, here is your dust! The first seconds our queen didn’t realise what happened. After a few minutes she was heating, washing, hammering, burning the dust and mixing it with other materials. A few hours later strange interesting pieces with different forms and materials were laying on her table and at the end of the day, as a real queen, she showed a very special necklace made of dust to the other participants, a necklace that surely would have astonished mister Hoover when he created his first vacuum cleaner.
Summer 2007
Ruudt Peters summer studio, Ravenstein in The Netherlands. Twelve young and older jewellery artists from all over the world took a flight to the workshop Fly now and tried to stay in the air of contemporary art jewellery from morning till late evening. The fact that the participants were born or lived in New Zealand, United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada, Italy, Belgium, USA, Saoudi Arabia, Argentina, Brasil, Swiss and Russia, worked together, lived together, ate savoury international meals together and mixed their ideas about jewellery, was an inexplicable sensation and experience. The way that Ruudt Peters and his assistant guided us through all the different cultural habits, found gates to fly from one place to another and from one jewellery piece to another, shared their knowledge of the art jewellery scene all over the world, made us realise at the end that we not only visited The Netherlands, but were all lifted off by wind and self made aerodynamic objects and made a world tour of art jewellery.
During the workshop we investigated ideas, feelings, colours, materials, textures, we passed and changed the borderlines of our knowledge and habits, learned to take difficult steps. Then we created dozens of pieces, threw them all away or left just one on our table. Why? Because it was made by the belly? Because it touched us emotionally? Because it showed the world upside down? Because it had power and balls? Because you could feel the tension between the forms and the materials? Or, because at the end it was not just a piece, but a piece of jewellery?
We saw, felt, sniffed, heard things, materials, pieces, as we never did before. We explained our individual feelings and creations with words, colours, movements, presentations and… tears. Ruudt’s talent as a teacher, an artist and as the pilot of the aeroplane Fly Now 2007 let us reach high clouds far beyond the power of our engines. (Gie Luyten)
Registration and information:
website Ruudt Peters