Playing without thinking
Weeks have gone by, and I’m already at the end of our first module. Presentations were last Tuesday, and it was inspiring and humbling.
An intermediate realization was that it doesn’t take a lot of time to make progress. One week, with the next class looming ahead with little to show for it, I threw piles of cardboard boxes from an IKEA delivery all over the room and up the stair well. I just played with positioning, simple stacking, simple geometries. It didn’t take long to do, I took a bunch of snaps, and then printed them out for the notebook. It at least broke the seal on play.
In class, I asked classmates what their approach had been, and one classmate also mentioned, in the limited time before class, she printed photos of rooms in her home at work, and then drew on them. What she drew on the photo of her kitchen became a beautiful waterfall of plastic strips and glass falling from her skylight. These little steps don’t need to be big, or impressive, to still push you forward.
This was a mistaken assumption I’d had about art and creativity - that somehow doing the work was BIG. This is perhaps a holdover from my time doing scientific research, where every step was kind of a big one. Just one datapoint for me required cutting some already prepared silicon wafers, depositing certain metals on them, baking them, then the painstaking work of dissolving away the substrate, such that I could image the crystalline structure. Art, on the other hand, is a state of mind, a state of awareness, and a state of curiosity and play, that one wants to visit regularly to create, but perhaps doesn’t have to stay in for long blocks of time. I will explore this.
In the end, I’m not unhappy with what I’ve submitted, which are, a clothes blob flowing from spaces in the kitchen and bathroom, and bamboo sticks taking up space, looking all minimalist (which is not my aesthetic, I swear). Part of the brief asked us to play with context, put things somewhere they are not expected, shrink, expand, think about negative and positive space. I did do these things. However, I did not really put myself into this project. I don’t actually feel much connection to what I created, except for maybe the clothes blob - I actually like this a lot. I played without thinking, which I think is an important part of the process, but not the only process. I forgot to include aspects of my mindmap on the theme of “occupy,” or elements from the artists that I found inspiring. All play, no soul. In contrast, many of my classmates turned the prompt “occupy” into a deeply personal theme, that they then engaged with.
Additionally, I will want to go deeper, iterate more times, perhaps after feedback. The clothes blob in the kitchen came as a third iteration of play, after feedback. The other interventions I made only had one or two iterations on an approach. When I have done all the obvious play, I need to keep moving. Let the idea rest, but also look for where else to go.