Workshop 3 What is normal?
The discussion of what is normal? stemmed from some key concepts surrounding my work for establishing practice about diversity and representation, these concepts were also important to Naoibh McNamee, Bismah Kanwal and Hannah Quill. The main areas we were trying to focus on were ethnicity/ culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and faith. The idea was to get a consensus of inclusion and if people’s conception of normal was diverse or tailored by their bodies and personal experience.
When planning this workshop, we looked at the activity worksheet made for the Tate by Linda Stupart ‘a is for alien’ on how to introduce the topic in a sensitive way, making sure they felt comfortable in the workshop talking openly and sharing. It helped us come up with questions like, ‘what does a normal body look like?’, ‘is your body normal?’, ‘what if somebody had a different body to yours?’, ‘would you like somebody if they weren’t like you?’
For the workshop we asked them to draw what normal was. We had a group of 3, one adult and two teens. They struggled at first, because of how open and broad it was. Upon reflect we could have introduced it better and maybe asked them to draw a body or a person instead of just anything, however we thought it would help the to keep an open mind, instead it may have overwhelmed them a bit causing them to over think the outcome.
One drew a butterfly, one drew several silhouettes in different coloured pens to form a crowd, some were left white, and others coloured in and they all had question marks where the face would be. The other person did more of a poster using words as they preferred it to drawing. The poster said: equality and diversity (in rainbow colour), all genders, all sexualities, able bodied, all capabilities, protected characteristics, everything on this sheet.
We then got them to write a short piece of writing based on the word home, because home is a safe space where you are most yourself.
Workshop 4 What is normal?
We only had one six-year-old girl for the workshop which had positives and negatives. We got to talk to her in depth about the topic, but we only got her view of normal based on her life experiences, if there were more people, she would’ve come to the realisation that there is no normal more organically, rather than us having to walk her through which felt like we might have been leading her thinking. We learnt from the first workshop and this time we asked her to draw people or characters she thought embodied normal and not normal and label them. When having this discussion, we used The Ugly Duckling as an allegory to touch on otherness, alienation and belonging, as well as the questions we had developed for the first workshop, which helped her to understand better that is what normal for everyone is different and therefore there is no normal. After the drawing we asked her to rip the drawings and stick it back together in a way that didn’t match up to show that normal didn’t exist. She was a little apprehensive and precious about the drawings and only ripped up one.
Workshop 6 What is normal?
For this workshop we had 7 young teens. The larger group and the age of the kids meant we could have a more open and inclusive discussion. We asked them to draw someone who was either normal or not normal. Then rip it up and stick it all together. This was probably our most succesful workshop. We also did a bit of blackout poetry/writing around the topic of normal.
