Thinking through making: wondering about tools
Not so long ago I made a couple of objects one after another. Of the two things, one gave me more satisfaction during the making, and the other brings me more joy as a finished object. The piece of twisted metal, that I spied on the pavement and pocketed, was quickly filed and made into a wearable object. The other thing – a tool – was a serendipitous moment where I realised that a brass ‘ring’ (a strip of brass folded into a geometric shape) that I made in first year of my BA and which, every time I wore it caught on my clothes and was too sharp on my skin, would finally have a home, wedged into the crack in an old wooden handle.
Notes on my creative practice: overcoming an inflexible mindset
I suspect I have an inflexible mindset. It troubles me, especially since I have learnt, via TED, that flexible and adaptive mindsets are the key to success for our youth and for people in general. How worrisome that my brain interprets things the same way and really doesn’t like to budge when it thinks it knows best. A growth mindset, is what it is called when your brain allows possibilities to happen. Why is it that my growth mindset is fair-weather, and only chooses to appear in certain situations? Why does it not grab hold of me, each and every day, when I am groggy in the morning or unable to muster the energy for simple tasks, and shout at me ‘see this differently’, ‘leave the house’ and ‘do something you don’t much fancy, trust me on this, you’ll feel so much better’. I sometimes wonder if leaving the governance of me up to me is the best plan…
Notes on my creative practice: my photographic shorthand
A day of hot sunshine. In this recessed garage entrance, shielded from the sun, the air is thick and static. Residues of hot car tyres and tarmac, exhaust fumes and paint. The building itself is a calamine lotion pink, painted all over, even in these places that people don’t really go or see very often. I captured an intersection of wall and cupboard, painted chevron floor slanting off into the distance. Bright turquoise, vivid against the chalky pink, the traffic yellow floor paint seems dull and yet jarring next to them. Fire-engine red obligatory safety panels hover in the corner – they draw the eye down the line of the planes’ interaction.
Notes on my creative practice: seeing & recording
As August is a good time for reflecting on your creative practice, when you have the time and energy to stop for a bit and examine how things are going, I thought I’d continue looking at my own creative practice here on the blog. I regularly write about what I’m up to, creatively, I find it helps me when I get stuck or it allows me to consider things that usually happen spontaneously that I don’t necessarily pay much attention to. I genuinely believe it benefits makers to really consider why they make things, as well as how. I recommend that people try to write about what they are doing with their making, regularly, unguardedly, as a way to understand what is happening. These thoughts are not necessarily meant to be essays in the formal, academic sense, but they are essays in the etymological sense – they are trials and testings, an attempt at figuring things out.
Notes on my creative practice: photography as drawing
Am I a photographer? she asks. Quite a reasonable question to ask someone who is attending a photography even run by photographers for photographers. I don’t hesitate in saying ‘no, I’m a maker and a writer’. After all, that is what I am officially trained in, I have a degree in making stuff and an-almost-lifetime in writing stuff down. And yet, photography is the medium I find myself turning to more often than not. Through the camera is how I have started to see the world. It is how I remember the places I have been, it is how I catalogue the experiences and the objects. It is my cypher for actual memories, or for drawing, or some other method of remembering that people use. I find the image I took becomes the shorthand, the shortcut in my mind of where I was, when. The image becomes everything.
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.