Hear from artist Jackson Farley about his upcoming workshop Jackson's Self-Help Course: make art with AI, badly and on purpose.

We all make stuff for a reason, even when we struggle to figure out why. For some it's storytelling. For others it's making sense of the uncomfortable, marking a loss, or saying bye bye to that version of yourself that's already halfway out the door. This workshop is a guided dig for that reason: your why. Bring a shovel.

My Jackson's Self-Help Course is a hands-on session in using AI as an accidental studio assistant: a collaborator that misremembers, distorts, recombines, and is unnervingly good at dragging dead and outdated things back into the room. Drawing on the logic behind my Have A Good Death series, you'll build a still life or collage around something that has ended: an obsolete object, a former self, a belief you've outgrown, your zany grief haircut that you had for like a year but no longer cause you've sorted it out.

It starts with a candid look at my own practice, tracing how a piece travels from digital collage and AI experimentation all the way to a woven Jacquard tapestry, including where the tools failed and where the failures became the work. The rest is yours to make. You'll gather raw material, use AI to rebuild it badly and beautifully, then think like a weaver: what survives when an image is dragged into cloth, and what gets lost in translation.

No technical or textile experience needed. Bring a phone or laptop and something, an image, an object, a memory, that you're ready to compost into something new. You'll shed whatever you need to shed, then leave with a finished physical-ish digital-ish work you can take home and show off to your real friends or your real therapist/s.

Workshop Date:

Saturday 22 August

Time:

1 - 4 pm

Cost:

Adult: $125
ATW Friends: $115
Student: $105

Book

Materials:

Please bring a phone, laptop, a printed image, or an object that holds a memory. This will guide your experience of the workshop. All materials for the collaging/still life will be provided. However, if you would like to bring your own materials to use in the collage, you’re more than welcome to!

Skill Level:

No experience necessary. Ages 16+

About the Artist

Jackson Farley is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Sydney. His practice intertwines narrative, humour and digital image-making to expose the absurdities of archaic power structures - colonial, religious, and gendered alike. Using digital media, photography, collage, AI and 3D methodologies, Farley’s work balances parody with sentiment, fragmenting and reassembling accepted forms to question art, history, and contemporary mythmaking.