Chasing Thoughts: Documenting a Lived Experience
As our world becomes increasingly more complex, the ideological distances between its organisational systems and institutions, and the individuals they are supposed to care for and represent, is rapidly growing. Societal ‘care’ – governance – at national and transnational levels, is still predicated on patriarchal systems and institutions: these continually look for ways to resist the influence of other modalities of caring as it refuses to relinquish the power and the privilege it has accrued over the centuries.
And amongst all this structural ideological conflict, the voice of the individual is being drowned out and dumbed down, along with a regard for how global events directly impact and shape their lives.
I will create a body of work that, in my individual voice, expresses and describes how I interface with and make sense of the world around me. This work will be a reflexive, material exploration of my lived experience, that records representations of my physicality, memories, thoughts, emotions and sensations. It will reflect on how my privilege is the product of patriarchal systems of culture, power, politics and history, and it will describe how those systems and the global events they initiate, are influencing the values that shape my personal subjectivities.
It will create an intersubjective space that invites viewers to contemplate with curiosity and empathy, the complexities of their own lived experiences. It will ask them to consider how their own experiences shape their relationship with the world, especially in how they impact, both positively and negatively, the lives of others.
This body of work will explore how the realisation of ideas is shaped by the interplay between subject, surface, process and material. Writing and drawing will act as the linchpin for the creative process. They will provide research tactics for examining and interrogating germinations, zones, processes and materials. They will allow me to explore an initial response to my ideas, teasing out constituent strands of a narrative, identifying and working with those that resonate and discard those that don’t. As the germinations grow, my interrogations will expand to consider the materiality and the facture, and how these can be used to reveal my embodied subjectivities: my thoughts, sensations and emotions will become material. It is through the actions of interrogation and exploration that the process and materials that will manifest an idea will be revealed. This approach may ‘release’ a ‘final’ piece of work in response to an idea, but equally, the process itself maybe the completed work: I will allow the explorations will lead me.
The work will be presented in an online space, universally accessible. This will take the form of a three-dimensional gallery, that can be ‘walked-through’ using a computer keyboard to control navigation. Using this digital space will allow me to experiment with agonistic or harmonious relationships between works, based on altering scale, order, and presentation beyond what is possible with the physical works themselves. The organisation itself will be a contributor to the provocative tensions inherent in my themes.
Apart from the online gallery, this curation will be supported with my artist statement, an insight into my process (as a piece of work itself) and interpretative explanations to help initiate the audience’s own discovery. This gallery will be embedded on my learning log as will a non-controllable video walkthrough. Images of my thinking and making will accompany in a related post.
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