28/08/2009 by James.

Just framed my work for this exhibition. For more/larger information and directions, see the link below…

http://www.bathartistsstudios.co.uk/gallery.html

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27/08/2009 by James.

I went to see Kurt Jackson’s exhibition at The Victoria Art Gallery yesterday. I love the immediacy and energy of his work, the mixture of quick pencil text, paint and the odd found piece of rubbish mixed in. The exhibition documents the flow of the River Avon from Bath to Avonmouth, with Jackson’s paintings capturing snapshots of his time at each place. Its definitely worth a look if you are near.

 www.kurtjackson.co.uk

It made me think again about whether I want to use my work to document specific places in a more direct way too. I used to focus a lot more directly on particular places, for example by creating a book documenting a particular walk. Some pieces still draw directly from my relationship with areas such as Savernake Forest, Salisbury Plain etc, but generally I like to allow my experiences of those different places to mix and merge in my work as they do in life.

After all, when you go home to your garden, watch tv or walk the dog in the evening, you don’t build a wall between those experiences ones at work, you make connections between one experience and the next.

I want that sense of interconnection to pervade my artwork as it does my research within learning, creativity and ecology. ‘Nature’ is everywhere, and is everything, and as a part of that, I want to keep blurring boundaries and fusing materials and imagery, reaching through to an interconnected reality rather than representing some kind of distant ‘other’.

I suppose I feel torn between a need for my work to go beyond the specifics of place in communicating a sense of the bigger picture, and wanting to express the wonder of feeling a part of a place and setting up a dialogue with it through making. Maybe I don’t need to choose, maybe the way I think will always determine how I relate to the world around me, and will come out in my work anyway, whatever form that takes.

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21/08/2009 by James.

a slightly blurry phone picture, but you get the idea…? 

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18/08/2009 by James.

Here’s a sneak preview of recent photographic work that I’ve been using to capture my experience of my local area as it happens… a recent holiday spent locally has really inspired me to further explore and value the area on my doorstep, just as I would in any other place that I’d visit or work in, rather than take it for granted.

I wanted a way of recording that experience that was immediate and yet allowed for a more creative approach where layers combine to bring different elements of a place into one image.

These images really start to do that for me.

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18/08/2009 by James.

I am just back from a week off, and straight into planning and researching the creative family learning project that I’m running with The Salisbury Museum.

I’ve mentioned before that we’ll be exploring the Stonehenge Landscape using visual art, and we’re going to start with a focus on the marks in the landscape, using mark-making in its different forms.

This week I have been rekindling my interest in the relationship of the ancient monument and its wider complex of earthworks such as Woodhenge and the Durrington henge, local natural features such as the River Avon, and the local towns and military settlements - exploring the area through maps, reading and walking - linking it all up and getting thoughts and ideas out onto paper.

The project kicks off in Mid September, so there’ll be lots more on here as things develop and progress….

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07/08/2009 by James.

I am continuing to read Conversation Pieces by Grant Kester at the moment (Uni of California Press), excited by the language and the confidence that the writing gives me to further develop and share my ideas on socially engaged practice.

I have been exploring recently (see the last post) how I can better articulate the relationship between art and learning and continue my research in the role of the arts within education.

Kester brings together examples of projects and theories that begin to provide a structure for holding and presenting such dialogical work and the research surrounding it.

Although the work that I am part of through 5×5x5=creativity is generally framed as a creative learning/educational project in which artists play the role of facilitators, I see no reason why it shouldn’t also be framed and shared as a series of socially engaged, dialogical artworks which take place within an educational context.

My art has never been about having the right answer, or claiming to know a truth that needs to be represented and shared, it has always sought to set up some kind of exchange and dialogue.

What Conversation Pieces does is to allow me to continue to construct a ‘home’ for my practice, a base from which to go back ‘out there’ and keep practicing as an artist who is fascinated by the potential for positive environmental and social change that comes from embedding dialogical arts practice within educational and community contexts.

‘In dialogical practice the artist, whose perceptions are informed by his or her own training, past projects and lived experience, comes into a given site or community characterized by its own unique constellation of social and economic forces, personalities and traditions. In the exchange that follows, both the artist and his/her collaborators will have their existing perceptions challenged…What emerges is a new set of insights, generated at the intersection of both perspectives and catalyzed through the collaborative production of a given project.’

Grant Kester

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04/08/2009 by James.

I ran my first session on the postgrad participatory arts & media course yesterday at UWE in Bristol. I was facilitating a group session around artists working in pre-school and primary education, called The Art of Learning.

I am fascinated at the parallels between creative teaching/learning practice and my own practice as an artist exploring the perceptual relationship between individuals and their immediate environment. I am excited at the idea of the artist’s creative process and the pupils creative learning journey echoing and informing each other.

Is art the documentation of an artist’s creative learning journey? Are children’s experiences of education as inspiring and adventurous as my own journey as I explore the world around me through my own creative practice? And if not, why not, when the reasearch shows the immense value of ways of learning that are centred around children’s needs, interests and innate creativity.

Through the various areas of my practice as an artist - individual, participatory, consultative - I am growing more and more to realise that the process that artists follow shouldn’t be a luxury, a thing confined to the artworld, it should be embedded within our society and our education system, supporting everyone to fulfill their creative potential in whatever area is appropriate to them.

Maybe that way we could evolve into a society that respects and values difference, and make use of what we have been given rather than striving to be something else, denying our true nature and blinding ourselves to the systems of which we are part.

 ’Ordinarily we aim for a literal picture of the world, but in fact we create a world according to our mode of participation, and we create ourselves accordingly. If we think in our present way, we will create the kind of world that we have created. If we think in another way, we might create a different world, and different people as well. Only the two together can change.’ 

David Bohm, ‘On Creativity’

(new work in progress)

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