We generally think of an artifact as something important and rare - a fragment of a past world. By documenting these fragments, such as a shard of pottery, we hope to learn something of how people once lived. But what can fragments from our contemporary environment tell us about how we live now? 

In the Artifacts of the Everyday workshop, we will consider ordinary objects, trash and fragments as evidence of the world we currently live in. By reframing this seemingly unimportant stuff around us as art, we can become more present to our own presence on the planet. For this workshop, we will collect artifacts from our everyday environment and explore digital and analog methods for creatively abstracting them, including crayon rubbings, experimental writing and 3D scanning. The workshop will include a brief walk to observe our everyday environment and collect materials, demonstrations of paper rubbing and free 3D scanning apps for smartphones, and prompts for making artwork. Participants will create a collection of writing, collages, and digital images based on their collected artifacts.