In February 2022 the workshop “transforming materials – creating meaning” with Lilly Stehling took place. In the workshop, the final course of the second educational path of the VHS Göttingen Osterode explored the exhibition “the breath below” by Silvia Noronha and experimented with found materials.

After a short introduction, the participants explored the exhibition and curiously engaged with the exhibits. The sound installation, in which the participants could actively participate by moving some of the materials, also led to new visual and auditory experiences. The work “Endo Coise” also aroused lively interest – a tall cylinder glass vessel in which a plant, from which the chlorophyll has been removed, floats in a liquid. Its green plant pigment combines with steadily growing salt crystals on a stone suspended above.

In the subsequent workshop, the group first dealt with the topic of color pigments in general. The question of what types of pigment there are and how they are produced was explored, and the participants came up with many examples.

During a field trip, they collected various grasses, flowers, leaves, branches, and clods of earth, and then tried out which colors they produced when rubbed onto paper. They were also able to experiment with various materials they had brought with them: Plant juices, e.g. blueberry, beet, carrot, grape, but also with spices such as paprika, turmeric or curry as well as with coffee powder and charcoal.

The abstract plant color pictures, which were created with a lot of joy in experimentation, were further processed with colored pencils, representational motifs were drawn in addition or fantasy figures were developed from the color fields.

Then they stepped into the third dimension: some of the paper pictures were folded, rolled and stapled together and glued and designed with further materials. Thus, some mixed media objects were created, which can transport the basic ideas of metamorphosis and transformation.