A work in progress
Creative Accounting: not knowing in talking and making pdf article
Listening to video below in addition to the reading
NOTES
Work left in the studio (past work) – used as a prompt later to explore. Get re-made/recycled as a new work. Unfocused desired, moments of boredom. Studio as a launchpad into the unknown – that one does not understand.
How artists make the unknown known – verbally and in written form. This is about the creative process of making work, when we engage and the outcome is not known. These events are helpful and potentially destructive – an awareness of its impact on our making processes. HOW artist voice, what and why they do – they begin to map their future processes. Appear to articulate, other times they re-iterate. Ideological becoming. Consider how artists use artist statements – designed to make their values evident. Rebecca Fortnum’s exploration of not knowing encourages artists to embrace ambiguity, stay open to exploration, trust intuition, prioritize the creative process, and engage with the unknown. This approach fosters a more fluid and open-ended creative practice, allowing for the emergence of unexpected and meaningful artistic expressions. I consider that not knowing acknowledges that uncertainty can be a source of inspiration.
Fortnum concluded that she should not speculate about ways in which artist move between submerges and conscious deliberations but that verbal and written forms helps the artist to articulate intentions, methods, processes and even achievements – but these can be useful as well as potentially destructive when one becomes aware of the impact it has on your approach. It is often about HOW, WHAT, WHY – stories we tell and almost map how we continue within this process.
I do like her referral to Beth Harland when asked, “how much are non-visual matters or thoughts a part of your working process?” replied, “For me making is thinking and I can’t separate them, so just as in the same way as I don’t want to separate form and content, the question doesn’t really make sense to me”.24
In researching ideas around not knowing in my practice, I came upon work by an Australian, Wiradjuri and Irish heritage poet and filmmaker, Jazz Money whose cross-disciplinary practice speaks to language, narrative and First Nations’ legacies of place. I found her poem, How to make a basket and wanted to include it into my work. When looking at First Nations artist I am touched by their acknowledgements of their entanglements with other human and non-human relationships. (I am considering adding it to my CR in the Research Part of the work.) A conversation between Money and another artist gave me insight into her thoughts, and I would like to quote one of the ideas stated by Jazz Money: “Filmmaking is my first love, but as poetry has become a greater focus in my creative work, I often find myself wondering how to bring these forms together. I see a great sympathy and relationship between poetry and filmmaking, particularly film editing: both take a pre-existing language or set of images and arrange them in complementary, contrasting or contradictory ways to communicate something to an audience. And in that pairing, you create a third space where new knowledges are revealed.” To me, this seems to be the space at my desk where I write my blog – here is where I have to reveal and add meaning (context?) to what happened in the making, and this can be overwhelming…
I have to consider that when writing about my work, my experience reveals in the way it opens ideas for further making – new concepts flow back to me. Weaving as a making or metaphor holds ideas of possibility, creativity and interconnection in my mind.
Reminds me of the funneling idea which tutor Lydia Halcrow has shared.
KEY MOMENTS
Do I have critical moments that shifted my thinking and approaches in my work? I looked back at the beginning of this course and where my work (outcomes)was focussed around spore prints, mushrooms and how it shifted to nest making and considering what a nest means in making and wanting to explore more 3d making and upscaling of drawings and paintings. It is important to think how I almost identified only that as what my work was about. I came back to this writing when I revisited my body of work and thought about how the process evolved. I had to ask myself questions about WHY, WHAT and HOW my work came about. When I started making bigger drawings of nests, I did not want to share this immediately on my social media – I wanted to keep part of the making process ‘unrevealed’ and see how the making evolved from here. It was almost too private at that stage as I was contemplating questions about attachment and vulnerability within my inner feelings. What was the nest becoming inside my thoughts? Why do I hesitate to use colour in the drawings, and why do I not move faster on the painting of the nest I started? (I refer to Donna Kaiser, who in 1996 developed the BND art therapy assessment based on attachment theory developed by Bowlby in 1988.) I attach value to art, expressing what is challenging to say in words. I contemplate the idea of making something as a holding space which takes me to consider my heart and mind, just like sharing a story.
REFLECTING ON
I think the important learning for me is that in this course, I have been asked to propose and reflect, but that making was sometimes way behind – I lacked that experience of spending more time making or that I am encouraged to go into the unknown. As I reflected on tutorials, I became more aware of ‘being pushed’ to explore and encouraged to go into a space of the unknown to explore and test new materials and methods. It took me time to loosen and understand that it was ‘good’ to avoid settling into a known method and practice but instead continue to step out of my comfort zone and let work surprise me. I lived between having work that was representable and work that was experimental. It was scary to think of upscaling my drawings, even more scary was thinking that I could weave a bird’s nest and present it as art.
I considered using writing to reflect on my work – I looked at work by artists, Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers, a collaborative partnership and work around checking in daily. Since January 2011, the artists have also recorded their moods in writing three times a day. This mood diary enables them to compare their emotional life with the GPS traces of their movements and collected text messages. Presentation of the act of remembrance, in human and machine form, provides material for the two-channel video installation Narrating Our Lines, shown here in full for the first time.
Writers like William S Burroughs used the Dadaist cut-up technique to look for implicit meaning in their
writing. Did you have any kind of intention or hypothesis entering this work, or was it more of an open
experiment?
First person narrative: Drawing in and outside writing – a residency and exhib and curatorial project. Co- artists (correspondends used post to send work )
What key moments shifted your thinking and approaches? A conversation, an uncomfortable realisation, an accident, or unexpected encounter, or maybe a process of working through….’. One key moment came when tucking my son into bed. Another is writing this. Through writing I’ve realised the strength of taking on a Posthuman approach (Hughes and Taylor 2016), accepting the agency of materials, along with an acceptance of the phenomenological experience of making. As Tim Ingold put it ‘The prosperities of materials… are not attributes, but histories’ (Matter as Actor 2023). As a human, I do not have a monopoly on agency. My materials, environment and social interactions all interact with me. I also need to keep pushing myself to accept that my material includes words and no matter how problematic, language is a necessary part of art education. It warrants challenging in ways that Fortnum’s chapter in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think alerted me to. Her notion that language can limit PBR heavily influenced the creation of my PBR piece Daily Bread. My subsequent poetic series confirmed my interest in testing the relationship of language to my creative practice via a discrete series that was separate but related to the painted Ode to Colour series. Exhibiting them together at my MA exhibition confirmed that language can be part of my PBR, and that non-language-based research brings different, equally important knowledge. As luck would have it, Fortnum is helping shape an upcoming conference in Glasgow: ‘On not knowing: How artists Teach’. I’m attending along with a small group (a Community of Practice!) of my MA peers. I hope it provides a rich environment to consider the potential of art education, and what pedagogy and spaces are best suited to the development of practice-based research. I also have a clue of what I’d like to do next for my PBR.
Making
Drawings in sketchbook with ideas of form, after my research into the nests of the sociable weavers.
Bibliography
Deaver, Sarah and Kaiser, Donna H. 2009. Assessing attachment with the Bird’s nest drawing: a review of the research Online article in Arth Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 26(1) pp. 26-33
Lehman, Neika 2023 Poetry reveals our world back to us. Poetryconversation://thecommercialgallery.com/media/document/d3e9020ab8f0ca32b07094daed4717a5.pdf
Fortnum, Rebecca. 2013. On not Knowing how Artists Think https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337331636_On_Not_Knowing_how_artists_think