WHAT’S LOST IS FOUND – A PRIMER
Three Exercises for Defining New Positionalities within Creative Research
By: Tia Halliday
About the Exercises:
Each of the three exercises below is designed to help you shift your perspective to (amongst, or within) your work. Each component is designed to emphasize different ways of engaging with the ideas, processes, activities, and physical ephemera we create as artists and researchers. Through this three-part process, it is hoped that you will (begin) to develop new touch-points, “holds” to grab onto, or areas of familiarization within your work. This assignment is written in an open-ended and poetic manner so as to lay the groundwork for open-ended creative work. There are no right or wrong answers or right or wrong ways to approach this activity.
Please take a moment before completing these exercises to “centre” yourself and leave the day behind. Forget the deadlines, the dirty dishes, and the emails not yet sent. Take a few deep breaths and a quiet moment.
1. Dwelling Within
TH: If your practice was an interior space, what would it look like?
GD: It would look like a big, gorgeous, reconditioned, enormous, newly renovated, sturdy old barn interior, with high ceilings, huge walls, wood plank flooring, and hand carved wood post-and- beam construction. It would look perfectly ventilated…neither damp, nor overly dry. The internal thermostat and humidity controls would regulate the atmosphere, so it would look like it smells, which is fabulous.
Each interior space within it would be evenly lit and automatically adjusts to the amount of natural light present. It appears to have a creative, inviting, warm ambience. The front space would look like a large, elegant gallery with a beautiful, bathroom on the side. The middle of the renovated barn would look like an enormous functional painting and print studios with beautiful, state-of-the art equipment. Within the studio there would appear to be enameled slop sinks, work benches, shelving for materials, a room to stretching and store new canvases, and any other needed supplies, i.e., paints, brushes, printers, canvas, inks, etc. Within the interior of the back middle of the barn, there would appear to be accessible business and research areas, well stocked with bookcases, desks, and a comfortable, fun seating for artist, buyer, curator, collector, critic, friend, gallerist guests. The interior of the back of the barn would look like it has a shipping/receiving area with movable storage racks filled with completed artworks that are regularly shown and sold.
TH: If you were to flip your phenomenon of investigation, what would be exposed?
GD: If I were to flip my phenomenon of investigation what would be exposed is that I do not know if my phenomenon of investigation is in reference to the first question/answer, or if it is in reference to my practice, so, my confusion would be exposed.
TH: What lingers in the interior of your ideas?
GD: What lingers in the interiors of my ideas is the fear that they are not good ideas.
TH: What is ready for the light of day and what is yet to be formed?
GD: What is ready for the light of day is what I have begun in my praxis, or studio work, which is well underway. While it does make me feel very vulnerable to be publicly documenting my under-paintings and intermediate phases of my work, I do photograph these stages and post via Instagram.
And what is yet to be formed is the resolution of my praxis or studio work, and a final exhibition. More anxiety producing, if not terrifying, is that my entire 40,000-word dissertation% (in UK called a thesis) %is yet to be formed.
TH: What objects, sensations, textures, or subjects yet-to-be currently are residing upon the interiors of your current research And, What new shapes are formed from this new orientation?
GD: In my mind, the yet-to-be subjects may be flat geometric painted, stenciled, or printed squares and/or regular, flat geometric circles. I imagine either or both on the outside, as the “top layer” …or the icing on the cake, or, spatially, the roof atop the structure… so to speak.
TH: Consider what is on the outside and how this structure shapes the spatiality of the interior framework, the mind, the imagination, the studio, the paragraph, the workshop.
GD: When I consider the reconditioned barn wood that is on the outside and how the barn itself shapes the spatiality of the interior framework, the mind, the imagination, the studio, the paragraph, the workshop, I am content to create and have my being within it…every day.
2. From Within Looking Out
TH: Firmly supported within the structures and interior architectures of your own making and investigation, what happens when your head pops out to take-in what lays around you?
GD: Firmly supported within the structures and interior architectures of my own making and investigation, what happens when my head pops out to take-in what lays around me is that I see that during the past six months I have gotten my praxis or studio work well underway. It currently consists of more than two dozen paintings that I am deeply engaged with.
TH: How does your own dwelling shape that exterior space?
GD: My own dwelling in them shapes it more as an interior, somewhat esoteric space, rather than as an exterior space.
TH: What conversation does your research have with what lays beyond?
GD: My conversation and research are engaged with the larger discussion of identities…color, race, gender, and otherness, and with the pre-feminist origins and history of abstract painting.
TH: Do your ideas speak in hushed tones?
GD: In some ways, my ideas speak in hushed tones, and in other ways, not so much.
TH: And if so, who are they speaking to?
GD: Regardless, who my ideas speak to is simultaneously broad-ranging, at the same time, a very specifically art-historically literate crowd. In that way, it is v esoteric.
TH: How do the shapes and spaces formed by your own ideas, your work, your approach, frame what you see beyond you?
GD: The shapes and spaces formed by my own ideas, my work, my approach, frame what I see beyond in such a way as to broaden the definition of abstraction, to make it more inclusive, and maybe a bit more accessible…at least to 21st Century artist practitioners.
TH: How does “out there” etch the surface of your skin?
GD: “Out there” etches the surface of my skin in such a way as to remind me that it is not a pinkish tone of dominant Anglo skin tones, but instead is the Olive-y complexion of my Italian, Greek, Northwest Asian, Eastern European, and North African fore-bearers.
TH: What lens have you formed out of your own blood, sweat and tears and how does the world seem when you look through it?
GD: The lens I have formed out of my own blood, sweat and tears is my own kaleidoscopic voice comprised of my multi-faceted “otherness”. And when I look through it, the world seems a blank canvas, upon which I am compelled to paint.
3. Nestled Against
TH: What does it feel like to get up close and fondle the fruits of your research?
GD: When I get up close and fondle the fruits of my research if feels like foreplay.
TH: Staying very still, take a moment to observe what new physical, whimsical or theoretical ephemera emerge. Named or currently un-nameable, what does it all look like up-close?
GD: When I stay very still and take a moment to observe what new physical, whimsical or theoretical ephemera emerges, it all looks like sex and birth and death… very up close and personal.
TH: The stuff that everyone sees, or reads, or considers?
GD: The stuff that everyone sees, or reads, or considers of late is Italian Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite skin tones and palettes.
TH: What if you were to drag a finger, the bottom of a foot or your cheek against it - what would be revealed?
GD: If I were drag my finger, the bottom of my foot or my cheek against it, “A Portrait of the Artist as an Aging, Olive-Skinned, Italian American Woman” is revealed.
TH: What is etched on the surface and what is impacted on your skin?
GD: All of it is etched on the surface and impacts my experience in and of my own skin.
TH: What does this orientation really feel like? I mean some would say that to take look at our work and research from the outside is a “foreign” positionality all its own.
GD: This orientation really feels like it looks…abstracted, sensuous, psychologically evocative, and emotional. I mean some would say that to take look at my work and research from the outside is a “foreign” positionality all its own. And, from the dominating non-dominant Anglo male perspective, it is.
TH: Is this proximity comforting or unnerving?
GD: This proximity is both comforting and unnerving.
TH: What tickles?
GD: The explorations tickle.
TH: What penetrates?
GD: What penetrates is the awe at filling in what had previously been overlooked, discounted, or ignored, if not “erased”.
TH: What sticks?
GD: What sticks is the energy it generates, which in turn provides my on-going interest and engagement with it.
TH: What stays?
GD: What stays is the persistence of the overall project, which includes on-going:
-Literature Review Reading, Note-taking, constructing the working bibliographies
-Bi-weekly or monthly supervisory meetings and note writing
-Weekly Studio praxis, photo documentation, and follow-up journaling
-Creative research journal and eDoc documentations…of all of it
-Monthly cohort meetings/studio visits
