If you document your lecture or your public speaking engagement you’ll be doing a few things at once. Firstly you will be creating an archive, which is irreplaceable. This archive can be converted into a DVD in a reasonably simple manner at your own computer. This DVD once produced, can then be either sold at future speaking engagements or through your website. I can’t stress enough how important it is.
Speakers need to be able to sell what it is they’re speaking about. This can range from information about modern art, or about sculpture for example.
You need to understand that when you are standing in front of an audience delivering a lecture, making a public speaking engagement, you are selling whatever it is you’re speaking about.
In one sense your topic is already defined. How do you make yourself unique given that the above is true? It is important to remember that whether you’re an artist, a student, a bureaucrat in the arts industry, everyone has their own unique story to tell, this is simply because everyone is different and has had different life experiences that brings them to the point where they are in their lives.
You can use a number of methods in your public speaking engagements. I have one called the “Fast track highway to success” for example, which I articulate through a series of diagrams, how easy it is to get sidetracked when you’re doing a project and get lost, only to eventually find yourself back on the superhighway way behind your competition.
Also look at NLP techniques, these teach you the effective use of communication psychology.NLP is a pattern of speaking. There are no “ums” and few “buts”.
Justice O’Connor has produced two books called: “Introduction to NLP” and “Selling with NLP”. Also good reference books on the subject. Human beings minds like to fill in the gaps.
There is a key factor at work here and that is unique to trigger your audience and emotionally. Let’s go through it step by step.??
One. First thing is to secure the audience’s attention.
Your look defines you. Market yourself correctly. Dress for success.??There are books that have been written about this particular component: Amazon books has a publication by John T Malloy, which is called: “Dress for success”. This is worth a read.
One. Speaking is more than just words. Activate curiosity.??
Two. Connect on the emotional level. There are six psychological pillars.??
Three. Imprint thoughts in their minds. Leave a vision on their minds.??
Four. Use language that empowers. Be clear and positive.??
Five. Provide relevant information.??
Six. Make a great use of people’s time.??
Public speaking essentially is about the “Art of speaking”. Your voice is controlled by muscles. You must warm up the muscles before you exercise, we may strain or damage them, keep this in mind because it’s a very, very good way to start a lecture or to start any form of public presentation.
Dahlsen has collected his “found” material all along the northern NSW coastline, a latter-day beachcomber. “I’ve even been to South Stradbroke Island, where I was artist in residence at Couran Cove at one stage,” he says.
“I walked up and down the 17km of beach there, and over a couple of weeks collected 70 or 80 jumbo garbage bags full of things that had washed up on the shore.”
“I feel the planet is in very fragile shape. I believe it could go either way, and I felt that by joining with Big Brother I could do my bit to help,” he explains. His motives were initially misconstrued by some of his associates, who accused him of selling out to the forces of commercialism, but he claims to have won them back.
“It doesn’t take too much intelligence to see what my intentions were. Some people saw my artworks on the program and judged me because they weren’t aware of the green theme,” he says.
These artworks exemplify my commitment as an artist to express contemporary social and environmental concerns.
By presenting this art to the public it will hopefully have people thinking about the deeper meaning of the work, in particular the environmental issues we currently face.
I knew that an unseen intelligence was at work and soon realized the potential of a giant palate. Then I began the selections of yellow coloured plastics to make up its own pile in the studio, then the red, then the blues, the rope & strings, the plastic coke bottles, the thongs, etc. Soon the floor of the studio did resemble a giant painters palate.?
During the latter part of 2005 and into 2006, I created a new body of environmental artwork, a series of Synthetic Polymer paintings on Belgian linen, based on the subject matter of plastic “purges” – plastic fabricator machine end waste. ??This work, considers cycles and recycling. I began re-presenting paintings of sculptures that are inherently plastic fabricator machine end waste. The use of plastic materials and their place in the evolutionary motions of recycling are important to me in constructing these images.
I see the real need for the massive social transformations that are essential, to adequately deal with such crises as the depletion of fossil fuels and climate change. I hope this work can be a timely reminder to us all of the limited supply of these petroleum based materials, which is a direct result of our current collective global mass consumerism.
By presenting this art, to the public it will hopefully have people thinking about the deeper meaning of the work, in particular the environmental issues we currently face. I hope these works will act as a constant reminder to people about awareness.
I would like them to find enjoyment the work on many levels and find themselves becoming identified in various ways with each of the artworks they see. I also look forward to the possible discussion that these works may generate as a result.
I say these things as being possibilities, bearing in mind as well that comments are regularly made to me about people’s consciousness, while walking the beach, being awakened after seeing my found plastic object artworks, similarly with seeing my recycled plastic bag series, people have marveled at the creative way I am presenting the recycling theme in an aesthetic way.
I’m constantly surprised to see the variations in these plastics, very much like how I am intrigued by the beach found objects I have collected over the years.
I imagine these plastic bags, which mostly have a lifespan of many years, are in fact on the verge of extinction, as it is only a matter of time before governments impose such strict deterrents to people using them that they become a thing of the past. A fitting end to what has become such a scourge to our environment on a worldwide scale.
John Dahlsen: I was collecting driftwood, on a remote Victorian Coastline, with the intention of making furniture and stumbled upon vast amounts of plastic ocean debris. This whole new palette of colour and shape revealing itself to me immediately affected me; I had never seen such hues and forms before which enabled me to make new environmental art.?
Since then – for approximately 10 years, I scoured Australian beaches for found objects, much of which I found as washed up ‘ocean litter’. I have since discovered this is a worldwide phenomenon, affecting beaches on a global level.
Coke bottles become translucent pools, puddling under wall sculptures of other found plastic bottles. ??Straws found on beaches become characters in compositions that seem to dance in a coloured frenzy reminiscent of Jackson Pollack. ??Found driftwood comes back to life in assemblages that become meditations on symmetry and environment in one.?
John Dahlsen has been painting and sculpting in his native Australia for the past 20 years. In that time his work has evolved from the formal training he received in art school to incorporating new elements also native to Australia – ocean litter: plastic bags, driftwood, rope and any other detritus washed up on the beach.
Like a Mark Rothko painting (an influence Dahlsen acknowledges), the colour combinations are at once so subtle yet so strong that they can spur powerful emotions.
The garbage offers a complex range of hues, textures, and sizes. Yet any sense of awe is tempered by the dismay of recollecting what the assemblages are made of. It’s hard not to see that it’s trash inside the frame.
