The Art of Noticing: with Irenka Pareto and Tess Taylor
Description:
As May opens, widen your lens, deepen your practice, and explore two facets of art- making, poetry and printmaking, amidst the glorious spring blooms of Western Hills Garden.
Spend the day writing, sketching, and making poems and prints with two noted working artists who are themselves in active collaboration. This day-long session includes a garden tour with morning coffee, tea, and snacks; two separate workshops; a simple soup and salad lunch; and a closing reflection and sharing circle with wine and a grazing board.
Cost: $225, limited to 10 people
Details:
9:00-10: Settle in with a cup of coffee or tea and tour the garden with a WHG docent.
10-12:30pm: Blockprints in the Garden
12:30-1: Lunch in the Commons
1-3:30pm: Towards a Poetry of Presence
3:30-4:30pm: Sharing Circle and Happy Hour
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BLOCKPRINTS IN THE GARDEN: Led by the noted printmaker Irenka Pareto, participants will create a relief print inspired by the Western Hills Garden plant collection. Learn the basic steps of creating a relief print: drawing a good image for relief printing, transferring images to blocks, carving, and finally printing.
TOWARDS A POETRY OF PRESENCE – CONVERSATIONS WITH PLANTS AND OTHERS: Celebrated poet Tess Taylor (herself an avid gardener and the editor of an anthology of gardening poems) will lead participants in an exploration of writing on rootedness and place. Participants will read poems for gardens, plants, and the non-human, use the spring glory and the plant libraries of Western Hills as inspiration, and draft 2-3 new poems. There will be time, if desired, for revision and a final reading.
All levels welcome and all materials included.
Making … engages mental and physical attention, engages proprioception, and allows the sensation of body-being-in-place. It might mean interspersing meditation or movement with writing or practicing a craft with physical products -whittling, knitting, repair– in tandem with poetic practice.”
-Counter-Desecration, a Glossary for the Anthropocene
INSTRUCTOR BIOS
Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright and cultural critic whose work deals with place, memory and cultural reckoning. Her five poetry collections include Rift Zone (Boston Globe’s best books of 2020), and “Work & Days” (NY Times’s best poetry books of 2016). A staged adaptation of her book Last West- about the life of photographer Dorothea Lange– received a CoLABo fellowship from Carnegie Mellon and played to a sold out run at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in fall 2025. Last West will travel to the Oakland Museum and beyond in 2026-2027. Tess has served as Distinguished US Fulbright Teaching Scholar to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland and as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” As 2024-2025 Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, she received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship to create poetry programming for West Contra Costa’s diverse public schools. Taylor has taught widely, both in the community and students of all ages, as well as at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and beyond. Her next book of poems, “Come Bite,”(to be illustrated by Irenka Pareto) is out from Milkweed Press in 2027.
Irenka Pareto is a relief printmaker –as well as a psychologist, social scientist, and educator—from Barcelona, Spain. Her printmaking intentionally focuses on ordinary life’s beauty as an act of resistance to inattentiveness and dehumanization. Irenka moved to the Bay Area in 2006 after earning a fellowship to pursue her Ph.D. in Education. Pareto’s journey into printmaking started in 2019 mostly through independent study and by 2021, Irenka officially opened her printmaking studio, The Wonderstruck Printmaker, and became a full-time artist. Since then, while continuing to learn and explore the medium, she has shown her work at juried exhibitions, participated in more than 30 fairs, taught relief printmaking to students of diverse skill levels, opened a successful online store and shared printmaking processes and skills with over 10K followers online. Irenka is illustrating Tess Taylor’s next book of poems, Come Bite. She has put down roots in Berkeley, CA where she lives with her family. Her work can be found at Builders Booksource in Berkeley and online.