My other artist-in-residency programme: at Submit To Love Studios, Headway East London Above: swift notes and sketches from making small talk with Mike, Ken and Saroj, 10 October 2017
Michelle Carlile is a great teacher. High-profile shows that the art studio manager has helped to lead at Submit To Love of Headway East London, a charity for people affected by brain injury, include a recent exhibition at the Southbank Centre. Watching Michelle work is something else. She is gentle and positive yet firm. She wasn't just drawing and painting. She was dancing, leading the artists to also jiggle (to Bob Marley), doing physiotherapy with the artists (guiding Lawrence to complete a circular shape on paper), having fun, making everyone have fun, making, creating. I began my first visit on Tuesday 10 October. I wanted to learn, observe, make small talk with the artists. I loved the mark-making, play and colour explosion. To conceptualise my visits as an 'artist-in-residency' challenges / clarifies my primary residency at King's College London working with psychiatrists and academics. I have qualifications in fine art and teaching but it was a revelation being there. The uninhibited play with perspective and scale, the pleasure of shapes, the visceral texture of paint applied on top of other paint was a kick in the rump that sat on years of framing my practice as and talking about it as research, in REF/impact/TEF/'contribution to knowledge'/etc etc. Kicks in the rump are critical to make the mind and body agile, to keep me on my toes, to shake the ground off my feet, to make me recalibrate, to mock anything that's fixed/stuck.
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My education/ gatecrash/infiltration / artistic intervention / durational performance / going native / fieldwork at SGDP You need to dip, no, soak, get yourself drenched, hands on, feet on, head first and get dirty, filthy for a full-body full-mind mind-full experience of something you are researching (objectivity is a myth invented by the elite to put down/marginalise/other those not working in 'traditional'/orthodox ways). American philosopher Donald Schön (1930-1997) conceptualises the ‘reflective practitioner’ as one who bridges the gap between the ‘high ground’ of reflection (‘technical research’) and the ‘swampy lowland’ of practice (where ‘the problems of greatest human concern’ lie):
‘In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution’. (1987a, p.3) The reflective practitioner undertakes ‘reflection in action’ – that is, thinking as we are performing an activity or, in Schön’s words, ‘thinking on our feet’. Not only that, ‘reflection on action’ – that is, evaluating our task upon completion – is critical, too. It is when we engage in both practice and reflection, thinking while carrying out a task as well as afterwards, and, additionally, by allowing ourselves to experiment and fail (1987b), that effective learning occurs. Experiencing Jean-Michel Basquiat's Boom for Real at the Barbican (outrageous, playful, highly-learned faux naivete, energetic, energising, unapologetic but knowingly clever, political) and Stephen Wright's House of Dreams first hand pushed everything to the edge, amplifying and magnifying the thoughts that have been swimming and concepts learnt since my residency (and how to present/reimagine these thoughts): the UKAAN Congress 2017, a seminar by postdoctoral fellow Dr Jessica Agnew-Blais defining adult-onset ADHD (and along the way dissecting the DSM V criteria for ADHD), and a DIVA training course for clinicians -- that's the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults, not the Maria Carey variety involving throwing hissy fits while looking fabulous. Here are a few unstable mappings that help me build towards my own lexicon and library of resources for my tapestry, itself an unstable mapping and forever incomplete (hence the participatory component - you sit on it to activate it, add to and challenge the layers/palimpsests). |