Past work, Future Focus…

01/02/2009 by James.

I’ve been reflecting on my past work and future direction recently, and hope that it is helpful to share my thoughts….

The more that I discuss the point of art and the potential for it to act as a means of social change and ecological renewal, the more I realise the value, honesty and integrity of work I made as a student 10 to 15 years ago.

At the time I was trying to create work that was about the primacy of direct sensory experience and the importance of dialogue between an individual and their physical environment, through exploring, recording and making.

The bundles of found materials, the text taken from journals and diaries of my walks, and the body spaces that I wove and constructed from local materials, seem now to embody this kind of approach best of all. I wanted to engage with an audience, to draw them in and leave room for their own response; a physical and a metaphorical or poetic space for them to bring their own creativity, ideas and experience, to empathise with my experiences but leave room for consideration of their own.

At the time I was impressionable, and was told it had all been done before; that it was craft and not art, that it was too beautiful and needed to be more shocking. Apparently I was being naive.

Now, after 10 or 12 years of working in the arts and watching the emphasis grow from shock and spectacle towards engagement and interaction, I feel like the (academic) art world is slowly catching up with the needs of society and of our natural environment. The power of working methods that explore dialogue between people, and between those people and the environment within which they are embedded, is slowly becoming recognised as a permanent need.

I know there have been movements that have sought to champion the rights of ‘the other’ and these have been vital, and still play an important role. Land Art, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Arts were all created for a reason, but what comes next and alongside them?

It feels to me that there is a growing recognition of the need for creative investigation and reflection on our individual experience, rather than models of art and education that subsribe to or react against established ways of being; and subsequently for dialogue between individuals and disciplines, as a means of creating a social ecology of connection and inclusion.

Language and working methods across disciplines are starting to be shared, echoed and re-inforced in a more integrated and interconnected way. Art and educational practices that explore the relationship between body, site, dialogue and process are championing the right for us to be individuals AND an integral part of a positively functioning whole at the same time, in a way that earlier artistic and political movements made way for but couldn’t quite allow.

SO…. I am revisiting that earlier work that explores the world around me and uses making to reflect on my experiences, which sets up a dialogue with the places and materials of my surrounding ecosystems. And I am continuing to initiate projects and conversations that support others to do the same.

And maybe, bit by bit we can create a world between us that values difference AND recognises what we share; that sees the world through a model of reality based on the interconnection of different subjective experiences, rather than one which reinforces the dualities of ‘us and them’, ‘man and nature’, ‘disabled and normal‘

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