The ON WAX global art laboratory is an art based experiment open to a global community from a diversity of backgrounds willing to explore themes of exchange and gift versus exploitation and appropriation through artistic expression. In this container, viewers and creators are invited to question perspectives and perceptions —both individually and collectively—and engage in meaningful inquiry through artistic expression. The ON WAX research project seeks to ignite artistic explorations that address the entangled dynamics between global North and global South and our intricate relationships with the human and non-human world.

Participants joining this collective experiment will be guided to directly experience hands-on artistic deconstruction and hybridization to disturb and expand their perceptions, while opening up to multiple perspectives. They will create and share collages, assemblages, poems, and stories, drawing from the common library of visual elements of the ON WAX project and incorporating their own personal imagery.

In expressive art practice we embrace the creative process as a dance between not knowing and knowing, between getting lost and finding our way. Art making starts with the intuitive call of our aesthetic attractors /medium /artistic modalities, not knowing yet where they will lead us, trusting that as we attend them diligently and embrace possible confusion and chaos, at some point coherence and meaning will emerge (William Kentridge 2024). Through my years of experimentation with the creative process as an artist and a guide, I remain in awe of how the hands themselves, the body, these parts of us that are not directly conscious, can access a different kind of knowing that emerges when we truly embrace “not-knowing” in art-making. Opening up to what we may find when getting lost is what we will explore in these collective experiments. This is the concept of poiesis—“knowing through making”—central to expressive arts. 

How to participate

• Send me an email specifying that you wish to join one of the up coming ON WAX art lab.
• You will receive an answer with more information and a short questionnaire to fill up and send back.
• Next you will randomly pick a set of motifs from the ON WAX library of motifs & patterns. The set will be send to you via email in the form of a pdf that you will need to print to join the lab.
• You will need to prepare some personal imagery to combine with your set. The details will be send to you once you register.
• The basic art materials you will need are: A4 white papers, pens, scissors, glue. 
• Not special skills are necessary other than you honest commitment to engage in the process.
• You will be informed as soon as a Lab date that you can join will be fixed.

I recommend that if you take a moment to read about the background of the project.