The focus of the week will ruminate on the performances and narratives that surround gallery spaces. We will reflect, react, and respond to the gallery; the architecture; social cues and pieces of artwork. We will be working between performance, sculpture, and lens-based media.

Sessions are built around a desire to create. We will work collaboratively as a group over the week, this may be on joint ideas or providing support for others work, thus offering the opportunity work in different ways, understand differing perspectives and thought processes.  

This weeklong intensive art school will consist of five days of workshops, performances, experimentation, gallery visits in Manchester, as well as:

-        Producing a risograph publication

-        Workshop with artist Nicola Dale who works across sculpture, performance, image and text

-        Exhibition on Saturday and Sunday, with an opening on Friday evening

We will be based in the basement exhibition space at Seesaw. Where we will be able to develop and produce new pieces of work that will be exhibited at the end of the week, either as finalised pieces or WIP.

Sessions is a Manchester based alternative art school founded by Andrea Allan in January of 2022. The origin of the schools’ format started ten years previously, when Andrea wanted to explore various ways of analysing galleries in an artistic format that didn’t specifically tie in with her overall practice, whilst only being able to dedicate a short amount of time to the ideas. Sessions takes its cue from jazz jam sessions, focusing on pushing and developing practices and skills, through play and improvisation.

Expanding this format out into an alternative art school cultivates a community of artists, individuals who have a shared interest in doing things their own way, who understand the importance of experimentation and pushing their practice in various themes and mediums, irrespective of the art world and its strict rules.  

The school will be run by Andrea Allan.

Places are limited to 8.