Inside-Outside

27/02/2009 by James.

With my new studio as a base to work from, I have been re-exploring the role that making plays in my practice, and how I can connect my everyday experience and my studio work in a direct way.

I have always valued the experience of handling and manipulating materials as an extension of my interaction with my local environment. After all, it is through the senses that we experience our environment and can develop a sense of self through relationship with it.

But a lot of contemporary art seems to dismiss making or crafts as a lesser form of creative practice, less thoughtful somehow. I am interested in how we have come to deny our own sensory consciousness as the source of our knowledge and come to rely on or react against existing theories and concepts instead.

As ‘fine art’ has become more conceptual, and society has continued to limit the role of the artist to some kind of conceptually reactionary genius, we have ended up with a system where art cuts itself off from a direct sensory appreciation of relevance to most people’s lives, and a wider society that cuts its people off from the benefits that such a creative experience could offer each of us.

I want to continue to use my sensory interaction with my local environment to learn about my place in the world and to reflect on those experiences through making, testing the knowledge that I have been given, and developing a new more direct awareness of the reality of my existence.

I know through my socially engaged work that I can support others to ‘reclaim’ their creativity and explore ways of learning that are based on direct subjective experience, but I still think that artists have an important role to play through the making and sharing of objects, offering a route to empathising with their own sensory experience.

So, for me, I continue to walk, write, take photos, pick up materials, make and think… then share my experience and support others to do the same in ways that are right for them.

I value dialogical ways of working but I don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. I make artworks that are drawn directly from my own experience, but I do it as an example and as a provocation, not presenting them as the right or only way to see the world. The object arises out of a dialogue between myself and my environment, and any meaning attached to it arises out of its relationship to the viewer.

Hand made art objects are valuable evidence of the interconnected nature of people and the material world, and the importance of a system of learning that is based on everyday creative sensory experience.

Artist, environment, materials, objects, participants and processes all combine together to play a role in encouraging the development of more creative, sustainable societies.

What is Craft ? Craft is remembering that art is seen, felt and heard as well as understood, knowing that not all ideas start with words, thinking with hands as well as head. ( Mark Jones - Director, Victoria & Albert Museum)

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