By Accident, On Purpose: Six standalone sessions at the intersection of surrealist and somatic practice

90 minutes each · Saturdays 3:00 to 4:30 · Adults · No experience needed

Settle your body, then make something you didn’t plan. Each session pairs a short somatic practice with a hands-on surrealist art technique. No experience needed. You’ll leave with finished work and a couple of new practices you can use anywhere.

Surrealism and somatics start from the same premise: that your conscious, verbal, rational mind is not the whole of you, and is often the least reliable narrator of what’s actually going on. The surrealists came to it through Freud and built methods to get underneath their own thinking. Somatics comes to it through the body, where there is information in breath and tension and impulse that thinking harder will never reach.

Their methods rhyme almost exactly. Automatic drawing asks you to move without deciding what you’re making. A body scan asks you to notice without deciding what it means. Both treat the evaluative mind as something to be bypassed, not because judgment is bad but because it arrives too early and edits out the thing you were trying to find. Both treat what surfaces as information rather than malfunction. And in both, there is no version you can do wrong, which is a property of the methods rather than a reassurance.

This is for anyone who used to make things and stopped, anyone who makes things constantly and has forgotten why, and anyone who has never tried and suspects they’d be bad at it. What changes isn’t your skill. It’s your relationship to not knowing. You will make something, and you will probably surprise yourself doing it, and you will get to meet a part of yourself you don’t see often without having to decide it defines you. The work is meant to put you back in contact with the spark that lets you wonder at all, and to make room for whatever you’re in the middle of becoming. It is much easier to do that in a room where everyone else is doing it too, which is most of why this is a room and not a video.

Each session pairs somatic practice with a surrealist making method, and stands completely on its own. Come to one, come to all six. Every session includes settling, movement, hands-on making, and time to see what everyone made. Materials provided, bring your own sketchbook or journal.

October 10 — Before You Decide
Every act of making starts before you know what you’re doing. We work with the impulse that arrives ahead of the plan, using automatic drawing, automatic writing, and sound made before it becomes language.

October 17 — The Voice That Says It Isn’t Good
The inner critic is a physical event before it’s a thought. We find where it lives in the body, then work with chance techniques that hand the outcome to the paint instead of to you.

October 24 — What’s Already Here
Orienting is a real nervous system practice: turning to look around, letting the room become known. It is also how you find your materials. We gather from what’s around us and build assemblages and small standing sculptures out of it.

November 7 — Two Things at Once
An inkblot is an image with no content that everyone fills with themselves. We work with doubles, mirrors, and ambiguity, and with what it feels like in the body when something can be two things at the same time.

November 14 — Nobody’s Alone in It
Nervous systems settle faster near other settled nervous systems. This session is built on that: shared practices, and collaborative work passed hand to hand until nobody can say whose it is.

November 21 — It Doesn’t Have to Mean Anything to Be Meaningful
Rest, non-doing, and the edge of sleep where the interior gets loud. We work from dreams and from nonsense, and let the work refuse to justify itself.

Supplies: bring your own sketchbook, all other supplies included

Skill Level: all

Age: 16+

Cost: $25

Teacher: Annie Terrell of ARTerrell.ART

How to register:
Contact Annie Terrell at annie@arterrell.art to register.
Registration ends 8pm the day before each class. Limit 15 students.

Any questions? Contact annie@arterrell.art