Notes on my creative practice: when is making not making?
Yesterday I made two things. One may stretch the definition of ‘to make’ and the other possibly falls under ‘re-purposing’ more than making. As I made them I wondered about this, whether the verb to make has enough elasticity to hold all the things we makers do as part of our practice. Even if, maybe especially if, we do not create things out of raw materials. You know where you stand with a maker who takes the raw material and creates something that didn’t exist before. It is magic, it is astonishing. It takes vision and skill combined. It takes patience and commitment. But what of the people who take something as it already is and adds to it, incorporates it into something bigger, adapts it or alters it? What then? It seems to me that there are still all the elements as before – the vision, the skill, the patience and commitment – however we might interpret the work as slightly different.