“And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”
Viktor Shklovsky, Art As Technique (1917)

Strange Makings are a series of workshops led by Ed Woodham designed to create performative public art that uses the concept of defamiliarization in order to experience the familiar in a different way. Strange Makings are actions that shake the performer and the audience out of complacency to remind us that anything is possible.