Here Be Sheep: A Mapping Workshop with Elaine K. Ng

What does it mean to map a place? This workshop looks at the different ways we take notice of our environments and how we might abstract from those experiences to create personal maps. Participants will view Ng’s work in the exhibition "By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth" and learn about her process, then will walk together outside to gather images and ideas before moving into the studio to create their own textile “maps” of the experience. Attendees should bring their smartphones for photo documentation. All materials provided, and all experience levels welcome. Snacks and drinks included. Free for all, advance registration is required. Limited to 25 attendees. Elaine K. Ng is curious about how knowledge forms, where it lives, and how it moves through cultures and over time. Her projects take shape organically around multi-faceted inquiries combining material investigation with archival research, interviews, and extended observation of sites and objects. She engages intimately with a variety of materials to learn their languages and map out different ways of understanding our relationships with the physical world around us. This interdisciplinary, process-based approach results in artworks spanning a wide range of media from cast concrete to plant-dyed textiles, photography, and video. They are quiet monuments to everyday relationships with the places we inhabit—material translations of unspoken and intangible knowledge. Elaine is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright grant for research in Taiwan and has been a fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library; a resident at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation, among others; and a Guest Artist at the Corning Museum of Glass. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has lectured and held visiting positions at NSCAD University, Tainan National University of the Arts, and the China Academy of Art. She holds a BA from the University of California, Davis, an MBA/MA from Southern Methodist University, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.