In general our five-day courses begin just after lunch on the first day (usually a Monday, but sometimes a Saturday or Sunday) at 14.30. We aim to finish on the final day by 16.00. This is to allow those who have come from afar to arrive here and to get home without spending an additional night.

What shape does a day have?

Not every short course is the same so it’s difficult to give a true sense of what a ‘typical’ day might look like. To some degree it depends on the time of year, and to a larger degree depends on the main focus of the course.

Nevertheless, a ‘typical’ day will have a mix of classroom and other guided time, being outdoors, working on your own, working in small groups, being quiet, sharing work.

We tend to hold the mornings for group / classroom work. This allows fresh minds to grapple with something in depth. Often those classroom sessions will include making small pieces, or working together in small groups, or being outdoors.

After lunch is ‘you’ time – time to spend on your own and with your own work and ideas. We often schedule one-to-one sessions in the afternoon.

And we do work in the evening. A week-long workshop quickly squeezes time, so we don’t want to waste those previous evenings. They have an informal feel, and may involve sharing other people’s work, or watching a film, or having a general critique and catchup about where you are during your process. We usually finish by 9.

Courses often end with some kind of sharing. What form that takes very much depends on the group. Short courses are not about working on and finishing a piece: they are about exploration, timeout, reconsideration, experimenting and playing. So just what form any sharing might take is entirely up to each group. By the end of the course we would hope that the group will have sufficient trust in one another to be able to show barely-formed work, or the playing out of something experimental. The group can decide, too, whether they want to open this up to invited guests – or not.