answerstoquestions

We have been asked a set of questions to enable discussion at Tuesdays meeting – some answers before discussing it with Naomi.

How have you pushed, expanded or challenged your practice through collaboration?

Throughout my practice I have developed a set of rules, a framework or paradigm to support, guide and enable me to make work. This activity is sometimes conscious as a creative exercise and sometimes subconsciously through the familiarity of making. This project enabled the opportunity to break a large number of the rules I have created; examples being the act of cutting and joining of individual elements towards the development of new structures, working with a range of materials new to me encouraging new areas of problem solving and working in new media in the form of moving image.

Observing how others make work and having access to ways of thinking which is new to me has been liberating and has infused in me a renewed interest in creating physical work from a place of making tools for thinking.

Do you feel you have fully tested and trialled your original idea that you set out to work towards collaboratively?

This has been very successful – providing a ‘creative jolt’ both through and away from my practice. We set out to move towards and occupy a place of not knowing. This was supported by all and underpinned our time together.  If something looked or felt familiar we moved away from it. This resulted in creating models and structures unfamiliar to me.

One deviation from our plan was that we said we would initially work separately for a period, developing our own entry points to the subject and then we would come together to collaborate but we naturally found ourselves working collectively from day one. This felt more appropriate and made sense in terms of the practical issues of location, our other commitments and the timescale of the project.

Can you prove this through outcomes and evidence or what looks new and different?

Yes – the work I have made set out to be process led, (quick, cheap and unfinished) so that ideas were at the fore of the investigative project. This way of being manifests itself in over 180 individual models (some consisting of up to 100 components). The project has enabled me to finally work creatively with a number of new processes and mediums I have trying to work with for some time; laser cutting and film making and to confirm my interest in the activity of creative thinking as an end in itself.

What is your residency’s impact or ‘success’?

I set out to be changed and have been. Through the project strategy we set up - of making, responding, reflecting, sharing I now have a huge body of starting points or thinking tools for new bodies of work that can be taken into a wide range of situations from education and health to architecture and design. I have made links with like minded people outside my sphere who I will defiantly work with at a later date.

Looking ahead- what do you or would you still like to do?

To see the impact of my presence. The timescale did not allow me to see how my thinking or the objects I have made fully impacts on The Centre for Robotics Research. There was a large element of sharing and exposure within the project but it would of being nice to be able to track an experience into a practical outcome – changing/saving the world through folding paper.

The ‘teaching by osmosis’ I witnesses was intoxicating and very different to my engagement with graduate and post graduate students within art institutions and something I shall try out but it would be interesting to be part of a PhD students lab team, supporting and working with a long term goal, providing an open ended sounding board for their research and in turn their thinking enriches our practices.

I feel that the work we have undertaken within the project needs to be made visible, both the objects themselves the process and our testimony. The dissemination of activity is the key to change.