A Year of Gentle Making (Books)
A Year of Gentle Making (Books) is a year-long series of online workshops for writers and artists who want to stay close to their creative practice – attentively, quietly, and with care.
The series takes the book – in its many forms – as container and companion. Across photography, drawing, comics, and artists’ books, we’ll engage with the book as a space for thinking, noticing, sequencing, and rest. A place where writing and image meet without explanation, and where meaning can emerge through repetition and over time.
The year is divided into three parts, each shaped around an everyday human need: sleep, exercise, and breaks & boundaries. The focus will be on grounding our creative practice in the body, in habit, and in attention. Each part has its own focus and materials, but together they form a single arc: from rest and dreaming, through movement and momentum, towards limits, edges, and what it means to stop.
You can join for one part, or commit to the whole year. Either way, the emphasis is on continuity, rather than productivity — on creating work you can return to, and a rhythm that can sustain you alongside everything else in your life.
The workshops are open to all artists and writers everywhere, all levels, all genres, no prior knowledge of photography, drawing, or book-making is required. All you'll need is a willingness to create, explore, and be open to the surprises in your work. Although the workshops are held in English, you're welcome to write and share work in any language.
Part 1, SLEEP (March – April): Photobooks
“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport.” Bill Brandt
Taking sleep as our shared starting point, Part 1 of A Year of Gentle Making (Books) will explores photobooks as a way of visual storytelling. We'll investigate personal napping and nighttime rituals, and draw inspiration from how we sleep, where we sleep, who or what we sleep beside, what happens as we drift off, and what returns to us in dreams.
Writing will be central to the process. Each week will be shaped around a title that functions as both a writing prompt and a way into image-making and gathering. Out of what we write – fragments, lists, short reflections and stories – we'll experiment with ways of working with photographs: taking new images, staging scenes, working with models, using found photographs, or recreating dreams.
Alongside this, we'll look at the work of artists who combine photography and narrative, such as Duane Michals, Carrie Mae Weems, and Sophie Calle, and see how meaning can emerge through selection, repetition, and sequencing.
Over six weeks, we'll bring together writing and images to create a small photobook or photozine (±12–32 pages), with an emphasis on simplicity, care, and letting the work be enough.
Week 1: Staring at the Ceiling
Writing as noticing and idea generation. Personal relationships to sleep, fascination, repetition, and questions. Imagining photographs before making them.
Week 2: Beds, Bunks, and Beyond
Writing through objects, spaces, and rituals of sleep. Exploring different kinds of photographs: found images, staged scenes, close-ups, domestic details, people and animals sleeping.
Week 3: No Need for Alarm (Clocks)
From accumulation to focus. Writing to discover patterns and threads, then beginning to select images and shape an emerging theme.
Week 4: Why We Sleep
Personal texts around need, habit, avoidance, medication, vulnerability, rest, and waking. Considering how writing and photographs can sit alongside one another without explanation.
Week 5: A Dream and a Lullaby
Working with dreams, memory, and tone. Writing short dream texts or short stories and exploring ways to translate them into images. Looking at staged photography, working with models, and finding inspiration from artists who visualise dreams.
Week 6: The Shape of Sleep
In the final session, we'll look at our own experience of sleep – its rhythms, interruptions and rituals – as a guide for sequencing, pacing, and form. You'll finalise photographs, pair text and image, and bring the work together as a photobook or photozine.
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” Diane Arbus
- Limited to 15 participants
- Dates and Times: Sundays, 6–8pm CET (click for corresponding times)
- Part 1 March: 15, 22, 29, April: 12, 19, 26. Total: 6 sessions
- Cost Part 1: €220 (see below for parts 2 and 3)
- Very Early Bird 15% off by 10 January, Early Bird 10% off by 30 January (no code needed)
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Part 2, EXERCISE (May – June): Illustration and Comics
“I don't think of myself as an illustrator... I write the story with pictures..." Chris Ware
Part 2 of A Year of Gentle Making (Books) takes exercise as its theme and practice. We'll write and draw through repetition, movement, and trust, and see what happens when we let the body lead.
Each week will include a writing focus rooted in our experiences of exercise and sport: surfaces, routines, short cuts and competitions, teams and triumphs. We'll move between writing and mark-making, and experiment with drawing as the widening of writing's movement on the page.
We'll explore drawing as thinking: drawing as something we do rather than something we judge. We'll experiment with scale and vary the body's position in relation to the page, we'll listen to the hand, move away from precision and perfectionism, and notice how meaning can emerge through the quiet act of mark-making. We'll keep it simple, and keep the hand moving.
Amongst other artists to inspire us, we'll look closely at the drawings of Louise Bourgeois and at the Apocalypse series by Keith Haring and William Burroughs.
Week 1: Surface Matters
We'll explore the surfaces we move across: pavements, mats, pools, courts, tracks, and fields. And paper, too. We'll work with scale and perspective, ground and resistance, and connect writing and drawing to gesture, breath, movement, and rhythm.
Week 2: Squats and Star Jumps
We'll explore repetition, resistance, boredom, discipline, and care. Through writing and drawing we'll see how simple forms repeated can build a narrative and a personal language.
Week 3: PTs and Short Cuts
Starting with Andy Warhol's "Art is what you can get away with" we'll explore imitation and borrowing as conversation. We'll write about winning, losing, rivalry, and ambition, and investigate what happens in our writing and drawing when we nudge ourselves beyond what we thought was possible. We'll copy, trace, and work with other texts and images.
Week 4: Team Work
Where do we position ourselves amongst other writers and artists? Building on Week 3, we'll keep writing and drawing in conversation with our creative antecedents and research other artists with whom we share an artistic language.
Week 5: On Your Marks
We'll experiment with scale – of our marks and our stories – and notice where we hold back. We'll work with speed, instinct and flow, and see what happens if we write and draw without stopping to think. We'll listen to the hand and let it outrun the critic.
Week 6: Minor Adjustments
We'll gather together the texts and marks we created over the past weeks to notice repetitions, shifts, and patterns across our work. We'll make small adjustments, look at simplifying the story, and let the work settle into a quiet zine or comic ready to share.
"The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri
- Limited to 15 participants
- Dates and Times: Sundays, 6–8pm CET (click for corresponding times)
- Part 2 May: 17, 24, 31, June: 14, 21, 28. Total: 6 sessions
- Cost Part 2: €220 (see below for parts 3)
- Very Early Bird 15% off by 10 January, Early Bird 10% off by 30 January (no code needed)
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Part 3, BREAKS & BOUNDARIES (October – December): Artists' Books
"An artist's book is a work of art in book form. It is an art object that conveys an idea in a visual and tactile way. It relies on the characteristics of the book form, i.e. personal scale and the sequential and repetitive nature of the pages. An artist's book is not about art, it is art." Nancy Linn
(taking) Breaks and (having) Boundaries are essential to sustaining a creative practice. We'll use those two concepts – breaks and boundaries – and their multiple meanings as our starting point to find the most resonant theme for a personal artists' book.
Weeks 1–2: The Intention
We'll explore physical and emotional boundaries, creative boundaries, geographical borders, and what happens in the margins (of a page and our lives). We'll explore breaks and ruptures, those we choose and those not chosen. We'll look at how some of these themes can manifest on the page: whether in creases, tears, or the disrupted spine of a book. We'll delve into examples of early artists' books and some recent works that tackle contemporary themes.
Weeks 3–4: Sequence, Edges, Thresholds
We'll look at ways of creating a wordless artist book, and how we can let go of language without abandoning writing! We'll keep exploring through writing our chosen theme, and experiment with the language of artists’ books: margins, creases, gutters, blank spreads, abrupt and gentle transitions, before/after. We'll write about beginnings, endings, and crossings, and question how we can expand the limits of our book.
Weeks 5–6: Resistance, Refusal, Tenderness
We'll experiment with different artists' book formats, those that allow movement, invite play, encourage conversation, and experiment with formats that reflect the themes of our work. As inspiration, we'll look at some artists' books that use "tired" materials, fragile spines, and deliberate smallness. You'll use writing about your book to better understand its ideal scope and how much it can hold.
Weeks 7–8: What Stays, What Goes
We'll keep experimenting with the language of the artists' book: cutting, folding, paper engineering, color and erasure. We'll write about the utopian version of our book and see what happens if we end earlier than expected, allowing where our book is to be enough.
Week 9: Completion and Rest
Final assembly and honouring the book as an object. We'll share work.
Limited to 15 participants
Dates and Times:
- Sundays, 6–8pm Central European Time
- Part 1 March: 15, 22, 29, April: 12, 19, 26. Total: 6 sessions
- Part 2 May: 17, 24, 31, June: 14, 21, 28. Total: 6 sessions
- Part 3 Oct: 4, 11, 18, Nov: 1, 8, 15, 29, Dec: 6, 13. Total: 9 sessions
Please click here for the corresponding start time where you are.
Cost:
- Part 1 €220
- Part 2: €220
- Part 3: €340
- All 3 Parts: €700
- very early bird before 10 January: 15% off, early bird before 30 January: 10% off (no code needed)
"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for." Georgia O’Keeffe
About the tutor: Shaun Levin is the author of Seven Sweet Things, Alone with a Man in a Room, and Snapshots of The Boy. Around 2012, he began making illustrated work under a pseudonym, exhibiting at the New York Art Book Fair and the London Art Book Fair, amongst others. His recent artists' books are held in the special collections of Harvard Library, the University of Delaware Library, and the Universities of California at Irvine and Santa Barbara.
Born in South Africa, he has lived in Israel, London, and now Madrid. He is the creator of Writing Maps and has taught creative writing for over twenty years. Across text and image, his work treats the book as a site of encounter: a space where inherited narratives can be questioned, reimagined, and gently repurposed.