York Art Gallery: Rosie Gibbens family workshop

As part of our ongoing programming work with York Art Gallery, join artist Rosie Gibbens for an exclusive, hands-on family workshop inspired by the Sin exhibition. 

What gave snakes such a bad name? In the Bible, a snake tempts Eve to sin in the garden of Eden. It seems strange to cast the snake as the most evil of living creatures when it is humans who are destroying the planet. We need to cultivate a better relationship with the non-human animals that surround us in order to maintain and preserve the ecosystem of our planet.

This workshop aims to celebrate the figure of the snake. Anything long can become a snake if you put googly eyes on it! We will create hybrid human-snake figures using sculpture and collage. We will build monuments to snakes with techniques used by Sarah Lucas and John Stezaker. We will think about what snakes would say to humans if we could communicate, and we will make snake music ssssssssssssssss.

Using a green screen, we will place our snake-selves and sculptures back into the garden of Eden, where they will dance a snake dance and celebrate everything good about snake-ness.

Commissioned and produced for York Art Gallery, with support from Make it York and XR Stories