Everything is Manipulation: Writing and Art Making Workshop

Join interdisciplinary artist Sun Park and writer London Pinkney for an all-day writing and art making workshop.

Park and Pinkney will guide workshop participants through a series of prompts to generate ideas in an interdisciplinary context. Starting with objects brought in from their personal lives, participants will consider the sacredness/holiness of their object and explore how to manipulate it. Through physical manipulation, participants investigate the object’s material possibilities and limits and are asked to also consider the relationship they have to their own bodies, to shared and personal environments, and to the sacred/holy. Participants will then write an ekphrastic (literary description of art) autobiography about their object as a way to literally redefine it and to redefine its relationship to our lives.

People of color and queer people are encouraged to participate.

As this is an all-day workshop, we ask that attendees stay for the full duration. Lunch will be provided.

This event is organized in partnership with Kearny Street Workshop and in conjunction with the exhibition Sowing Worlds on view at the SFAC Main Gallery through February 11, 2023.

About the Artists

Sun Park is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Art at San Francisco State University. Park’s hybrid work —which includes video, installation, ceramics, ritual, and writing—has been shown at 41 Ross (San Francisco, CA), Aggregate Space (Oakland, CA), and Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), among others. Park considers entangled bodies—human bodies, animal bodies, bodies of water, divine bodies, or a community—and the physical sensation of their porosity. Ceramic objects, installations, videos, and writing combine to create mythological worlds. Borders shift as characters interact with each other and exit from one community into another. Visual and literary abstraction functions as way to incorporate Sun’s personal spiritual history—with Christianity and Korean shamanism—and experience with different environments—salt marshes and the ocean—into fantasy worlds.

London Pinkney is a writer and editor. She obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Pinkney is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Ana. Her work can be read in various publications, including Ugly Boyfriend and the anthology Nonwhite & Woman (Woodhall Press). As a writer & interdisciplinary artist, London Pinkney’s work explores how to use language to reimagine our connection to home, our bodies, and the greater world. And in this exploration, Pinkney often returns to how visual art & the written word work in tandem to create meaning. Pinkney's work explores the following questions: What does it mean for a person to deem something holy, given the historical context of that word? What is the “weight” of the words we use? What cultural & political consequences arise when people of color & queer folks use language to literally redefine their environment?