Mind Over Matter? Exploring Making is a three-part creative research workshop that fosters your understanding of objects by exploring the processes by which they are made. The interaction of mind, hand, and material is at the heart of what this course is all about. Do we always design & plan objects before making them? Or do forms and things emerge organically?

Join BGC PhD students, Geoffrey Ripert and Nicholas De Godoy Lopes, as they take you on a deep dive into the ways that color, rhythm, and shape influence our understanding of objects. Each theme is explored in independent sessions that will involve object studies presented by the session leaders and a BGC faculty member.

Participant interaction is strongly encouraged through questions, wider discussion, and an activity concluding each session.

From the methodical gestures of the maker to the give-and-take of the material, rhythmic motion has always been at the heart of the making process. This session explores how we can read the rhythms of the creative process within the object itself, whether produced by hand or by machine. With guest speaker Drew Thompson.

Other Workshops in the Series:

Color
Wednesday, February 23
6-7:30 pm
With Jennifer L. Mass

Shape
Saturday, March 5
2–3:30 pm
With Hadley Jensen

Meet the Speakers:

Nicholas de Godoy Lopes received his Master’s in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies in the Parsons/Cooper Hewitt program. His thesis discussed Art Nouveau pattern books as disseminators of theories of ornament centered on nature and shaped by the natural sciences, particularly biology. His interests include theories of ornament, design and design theory in the nineteenth century, intersections of design and science, and historical practices of displaying material culture. He also studies the design of contemporary tabletop games. Before coming to the BGC, he was the McDermott intern in Decorative Arts and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art. He has also interned in the European Sculpture & Decorative Arts department at the Met and was a student fellow in the Wallcoverings department at Cooper Hewitt.

Geoffrey Ripert is a second-year PhD student at Bard Graduate Center. His research interests center on eighteenth-century French Decorative Arts and the history of collecting, particularly the taste for, function and display of hardstone objects in the secular interior. He is also interested in the survival of Greco-Roman antiquity in the material culture of early modern Europe. Previously, Ripert was Curatorial Assistant for Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection, worked for an art dealer in Paris, and interned at Cooper Hewitt and the Musée du Louvre. Ripert holds an M.A. from the Ecole du Louvre, an M.A. from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and a B.A. from the Sorbonne.