09/02/2009 by James.

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09/02/2009 by James.

It’s been a while since I had the space to do much making of my own…. and in a couple of weeks I’ll be in a new studio, ready to go again!

I value the act of physically exploring materials as a way of reflecting on and sharing my experiences and my learning, setting up a similar kind of dialogue between my body and its material environment as that between myself and the participants in socially engaged work. It is at the point where my body and my physical environment meet and touch that I learn about who I am, where I am and what I am part of, through my senses.

While I have been without a dedicated work-space I have mainly been focusing on socially engaged work, and on documenting my own walks/travels and conversations using text, photos, and collages of found and gathered materials and imagery.

I see these stages of exploring and making as key to my practice as an artist exploring ecology and relationship… I move through the landscape and I reach out and touch, I stop and listen, I collect, and then after I find ways to construct objects that act as evidence of these interconnecting experiences.

The scale and the means of the interaction between myself and a place, a person, or an object may be different, but the intentions are the same…. to explore through dialogue and to learn and develop through that experience… to blur boundaries and to promote an awareness of self and environment based on interconnection.

Hopefully the objects that remain afterwards help to communicate some of that to others… to act as evidence of my experiences and to invite new ones between them and the people with whom they are shared.

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