“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Aristotle)
This is becoming the mantra that I run everything through at the moment. I believe it to be true. But I don’t know what it is or why. But it seems to apply to everything I look at or think about. It is mysterious. It holds within it such faith. But it is deeply human to me. We are more than what we are made of. More than skin and bone, more than a screen of pixels, more than a line of stitches.
Listening to the talk about touch and haptics has got me thinking about this more too… we hardly know anything about ourselves, how our skin works with our brain.
The effect this has on my work is beginning to show. At last, I’m beginning to see the benefit of the enforced break from making, allowing me to think this through WITHOUT the touch. Coincidence at play again.
We feel things without touching… how amazing is that? The touch thing is pretty fantastic, but to gain information about the world around us without actually touching it is downright miraculous.
I am starting to think about the work, even unmade, in terms of the gallery space. For me there is always the conundrum about touch. My work is so tactile, the feel of it to me as I make it and hang it is crucial. Yet in the gallery setting, touch is positively discouraged. I deny my audience the main thing the work is about.
I didn’t know this was where I was going. I read back over this blog, and until a week ago I had no idea this was in my head. Ridiculous, and Bo will undoubtedly claim to have seen it all the time and say he was just waiting for me to catch up. I have a special noise I make on these occasions but I don’t know how to spell it.
I look at the work I have hung up in the room where I work, gauzy pieces of muslin wafting in the air currents I feel but don’t touch, moving differently as the air gets warmer throughout the day, in the changing temperatures I feel on my skin. I have already started to harden some of these fabrics so that they don’t move. I had started to do this a couple of weeks ago… why? Why had my body started making something that I have only just thought about with any sort of clarity.
Because we are greater than the sum of our parts, that’s why.
