On Friday I looked around what could easily be a great studio. The place would suit up to about ten individual artists, or perhaps fewer if I/we can pull off a collaboration with ABF (a well established national adult education organisation) who are looking for some kind of collective/educational creative workshop here in town.
A collaboration could be mutually very beneficial. Logistically it would be simple as ABF already rent premises in the same building – the studios and ABF even share an entrance and disabled access.
I realised last week that a combination of the cold and the windowlessness of the studio that I currently share with Klas are very real disincentives to going there and getting on with things. Klas is in agreement that we need to find somewhere else.
The idea of having a warm and workable studio is very appealing. My head is full if ideas and things that I want to try out – I want to play with materials. I need to play with materials! I need to get the ideas out and made tangible. I need to see and feel things in font of me. Spending too much time pondering and thinking, even sketching and writing, lacks the materiality and reality that is needed. Things will only be resolved physically.
Or perhaps I should say that I want to resolve things physically. My most successful pieces to date have come through playing with materials and following my intuition.
Continuing to pack-up the studio at home …
The need to make feels quite urgent. There is something that I want to work out. (I had not really thought about the content of that expression before – now the word ‘out’ seems particularly significant.) Part of me is drawn towards shapes and forms that tend toward the baroque, another part towards things minimal and clean. I can toss these ideas around and contextualise both in relation to the social and political climates. But these ideas are not real – they have no volume, no weight, and no presence. I want to work with these qualities. I want to engage with processes that will take me somewhere that I cannot foretell. If I could predict the results then working things out with materials would be meaningless or at best illustrative. I do not want that for my work.
Getting an appropriate studio is a priority.
