In Eva's work as a facilitator, she develops workshops that engage groups in creative place-making, reflecting on ways of recording and inhabiting spaces. Explorations have included: queer intimacies, the environment and future imaginaries.
Regular workshops (2023 - present) are Make and Connect and Families workshops for the Royal Academy, previous workshop programmes (2020 - 2023) include Archiving Your Life with Queer History Now, You Spoke in Colours at Brighton CCA in partnership with Cinenova, Dartington Trust Family Sessions, OxPrep Summer School and young refugee charity The Hummingbird Project.
Make and Connect Forming Projections, The Royal Academy
This workshop invited participants to play with the surfaces of photographs, adding layers, masks, and colours to create new playful images.
Cutting, layering, and repositioning were encouraged to think through how we can create fragmented visuals.
Make and Connect Printing our Foundations, The Royal Academy
This workshop invited participants to create their own blueprint that holds reflections on how public buildings or spaces could best benefit them. Wooden dowel maquettes were placed on top of the blueprints, as invitation to build upward - asking the group what visuals would reflect the space?
You Spoke in Colours at Brighton CCA in partnership with Cinenova
Taking inspiration from Noski Deville’s Loss of Heat Eva invited participants to explore and experiment with found imagery, collage materials, and slide projections to visualise a dream, memory, or something in between. Building on process rather than outcome and touching on ideas surrounding creative play and futures, intuition, and queerness.
During the workshop, the group explored 3 creative exercises; Listening Lines, squiggles, and dots.
Text Collaging (following the cutouts) and Sensory Lucky dip with Dandelion, Knife, Brush, Apple, and Stone. Pieces can be seen below:
About the programme: Cinenova invited partners to support the screening programme through a series of workshops that continue a commitment of feminist filmmaking as a tool and framework for community cohesion, consciousness-raising and anti-racist education.
Archiving Your Life is the project that Queer History Now engaged with in April 2020. Managed by Photoworks and Queer Heritage South, the LGBTQ+ youth-led programme is dedicated to preserving queer archives and enabling the queer community to take control over the stories and narratives that are told about their lives.
The group worked across a series of creative Zoom workshops exploring ways of using photography to engage with archive materials and themes explored. The project has been facilitated by artist Eva Louisa Jonas and Ricardo Reverón Blanco of Photoworks with guest arts & heritage professionals, including E.J Scott curator of Museum of Transology and Jamie Brett from Youth Club Archive.
See the online exhibition ----> here.
Queer History Now members, Liam, Eva (facilitator), Janet, Ellie, and Adrian meeting to discuss ideas
An outcome of the workshops was a manifesto to address ideas around representation and collections in museums and institutions. This was included in the Photoworks Festival in a Box 2020 Propositions for Alternative Narratives.
Oxford Prep Photo Workshops as part of Oxford University Summer Schools at Ruskin School of Art
How can we reinvent the picture plane together?
Explore playful ways to think about creative processes in picture-making. Camera Obscura Create your own Camera Obscura, stack them together with others, and then trace the assembled image on large sheets of paper.
Image Collage Photography has a long history with collage <3 Explore ways to subvert that by relinquishing control over the collage - wear blindfolds whilst collaging, collage to music, and take over walls and spaces in large collage installations.
Creative Family Sessions at The Dartington Trust in Totnes, Devon.
Taking inspiration from the Dartington grounds, its colours, flora, fauna, and wildlife.
Pictured below: Anthotype workshops using foraged wild garlic and dandelions from the Dartington grounds, April 2023.
Light Falls, The Hummingbird Project
After a programme in April 2022, Eva was then invited back the following April, by Creative Future to lead a second programme of workshops for The Hummingbird Project.
The workshops drew from the use of light within Photography but also in the every day to explore how we see and how it makes us feel. Workshops centered around adding and layering different forms of light through light dotting, projections with slide film and light trails.
Through February and March 2022, In partnership with Creative Future, Eva worked with the Hummingbird Project a Young Refugee charity on a series of photographic workshops. Taking inspiration from the sky, clouds, green spaces, and sea the group engaged in visual, sensory, and tactile creative exercises to document the traces, movements, and rhythms of the world around us.
Through the workshops and the observing and recording of our surroundings, we reflected on how nature benefits our mental health and well-being. The work was made into a collaborative short moving image piece 'How Moth the Night is' by Thomas Buckley and screened as part of Brighton's Third Thursdays in April 2022.
