On November 9-11, 2022, as a part of the Student Days of Nitra Universities, dr. hab. Iwona Bugajska-Bigos and Nadia Bigos, visited the Department of Creative Arts and Art Education, Faculty of Education, CPU in Nitra.

Department has been cooperating with dr. hab. Bugajska-Bigos for a long time, and the results of this cooperation is participation in several projects dedicated to the interpretation of art work, as well as symposia and many publications. Dr. hab. Iwona Bugajska-Bigos is the guarantor of teaching and art-oriented study programs and Head of Department of Art Education and Visual Arts at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Arts of the State University of Applied Sciences in Nowy Sacz, Poland (Akademia Nauk Stosowanych w Nowym Sączu). For a long time, she has been devoted to the area of art therapy with various groups of people, she leads lectures and workshops, and she is also the author of several projects and publications on this topic. However, she is also artistically active, as evidenced by her enamels and textile objects, currently exhibited in the Gallery Univerzum FE CPU in Nitra at the exhibition Words – Extension from November 10 to november 22, 2022.

  

Her lecture, entitled The usage of new media in art therapy, which was also part of her Erasmus+ teaching mobility, took place on November 10, 2022 and was unique in its focus. Before the outbreak of the epidemic, Iwona Bugajska Bigos prepared a project that was aimed on the use of the mobile phones and the phenomenon of sharing on social networks. Dr. hab. Iwona Bugajska-Bigos presented the goals, progress and the results of project. The main idea of project was to help people cope with the situation at that time, through the creation of photographs, collages or comics from photographs, artworks made in freely available graphic drawing programs, videos, etc. Tasks allowing individual self-expression were sent to the project participants, and the authors then shared the results of their creation on a web page created especially for this project. Dr. hab. Bugajska-Bigos documented the response to the project and its positive impact on the participants with a number of photographs, images and videos. At the end of the lecture, students and teachers of Department of Creative Arts and Art Education, Faculty of Education, CPU in Nitra had the opportunity to try one of the tasks from the project - to create a photo puzzle using an ambiguous photo. The participants of the lecture shared their photos (two of them are also included in the photos) in person and later also virtually with Dr. hab. Bugajska-Bigos.

  

The lecture was followed by the workshop named Design of Character - what is OC? lectured by Nadia Bigos, a second-year digital design student at the Pedagogical University in Krakow, Poland. Nadia Bigos has been exploring the fun world of creating her own original characters for several years. In her presentation, she explained how this trend of art creation came about, presented the process of how to start creating characters, showed the examples of the characters and figures, but also stated the artistic, psychological and social benefits that this method of creation provides. The students, participants of the workshop, were then supposed to draw their own character, inspired by already existing characters or their imaginations. Among the photos from the workshop, besides the student works created at the workshop, we also present Nadia Bigos's own art works, which were simultaneously exhibited in the Univerzum Gallery PF UKF at the exhibition named My Escapism.

Text: PaedDr. Janka Satková, PhD., Head of Department of Creative Arts and Art Education, Faculty of Education, CPU in Nitra
Photo: doc. PhDr. Adriana Récka, PhD. (1-3), PaedDr. Janka Satková, PhD. (4-15)