Thinking Through Making: 1:1 Building with paper

Course description:

This workshop explores 1:1 sketching by using paper and cardboard. Rather than representing an idea, sketching and building live becomes a physical act of thinking, a way of testing scale, proportion, spatial relationships, and how a future work might occupy a space. Participants will develop analogue methods for generating, testing, and refining three-dimensional ideas through embodied, hands-on experimentation.

The workshop approaches full-scale making from both artistic and scenographic perspectives, exploring how body, light, and space shape our experience of an artwork. Through short introductions and practical sessions, students work individually or collaboratively, depending on their approach. Group work encourages joint exploration with multiple perspectives, while individual work allows for developing specific ideas. Participants may bring additional materials that support their process.

The workshop also includes a guided visit to Aarhus Theatre, offering insight into backstage production and the making of large-scale sets and staged environments.

Bio:

Queenning Zhao is a Stockholm-based artist whose practice moves between sculpture, installation, and scenography. Her work explores how memories, histories, and cultural knowledge are shaped and reshaped over time, often through loss, displacement, and a longing for origins, both personal and collective. Inspired by theatre stage sets, Zhao works with shifts in scale, materiality, and perception, navigating between the intimate and the monumental, the authentic and the artificial.

Many of her works begin with found materials, which are then transformed through processes of making, shifting their meanings and generating new narratives.