extract, interact, hold, clasp. When we extract we remove, take out something. I wonder whether this idea of extraction is about clarity or about a rejection. We get rid of something or we take something so that we look at it more clearly. Hold it in mind - keep it as a central concern -attend- concentrate - think of an extract. extraction takes something from a context and recontextualises it, bu the new knowledge of ts new existence, as a new thought, new body, new idea. In a recent converstaion with Charles Garoian he shared a paper with me that he was about to have published that discusses a stone. After reading his paper I mentioned my cutrrent preocupatiosn and how the stone was located within my thinking. I said 'Stones and handfuls are interesting to me, the idea of the grasp, to grasp, get a grasp of. The handful being at times too much to hold or with the potential of taking hold.' I also sent him the clay grasp image which of course is not a stone He said in response that he saw stones as ' enigmatic handfuls, their grasp questionable, difficult to get hold of, seemingly immutable while indeterminate. I encounter similar characteristics in the piece you sent me. I don't know what it is, it doesn't matter, because it is in the process of grasping its ungraspable performativity that is life affirming.
I keep rememebering an experience from a project I was involved with some years ago and how one moment in a collection of many learning encounters for myself and the participants seems still so important and relevant to my thinking actions. It took place during a project with a gallery and school for children with special educational needs that i worked on for over a year.
In one session, the class was presented with a sack of potatoes. I undid the top of the sack and poured the potatoes onto the floor of the gallery. They rolled and clustered together but had formed a mound in the middle. The shiny wooden floor was occupied by these potatoes, not grubby but their organic physical presence was very clear. They seemed beautiful in the space as they fell from the sack but I was aware of their noise as they pounded the floor in front of the children. Some of the children were sensitive to noise and so I felt an amplification of the potatoes making contact with the gallery although none of the children flinched. One young girl who was severely autistic had stared intently at the action. I had never heard her speak in the sessions I had run with the class but she had always participated with determination and intent. She walked to the potato mound and sat in the middle of it, taking potatoes in her hand and when she had settled holding the potatoes she began to sing. She sang loudly and beautifully, with an operatic- like voice that filled the room. The potatoes were suddenly all hers, she suddenly owned them. She seemed powerful as did the potatoes. The potatoes afforded a space of clarity for this little girl as she spoke with them and through them. It was this action that remained so relevant to my practice. There is a way of being so present in an experience that the engagement or agency becomes almost overwhelming. The girls approach and understanding of the potatoes presence was palpable. There was no doubt in the objects relevance and no need to treat them as potatoes - they were objects to use and play with and encounter. The term ‘critically looking’ is discussed as a form of intense interpretation by Heywood and Sandywell but I want to extend this into a embodied experiential action, where ‘critical looking’ becomes ‘critical materiality’. A place where action drives meaning. This becomes that and all possible functions and identities are thrown into a state of flux. They land in the context of the person that holds them and activates their new meaning. Their becoming is formed and realised through their new meaning, It becomes a truth, 'a truth procedure' badiou. As I write and locate my research within the appropriate contexts and relevant literature I am strangely reminded of the game rock paper scissors. I am using this analogy or 2 reasons one is that I always return to an action, material or image within my writing. It allows me to ground the relevance of the thinking through experience and beyond the internal experience of reading and a conceptual understanding. The material and experiential tropes that can litter my research allow the ideas to be applied so that thoughts can be seen working. The understanding can be materialised. The method, the idea and concept as stuff. I return to material at all times as though it provides a physical guide rope that is pulling me along. The wrestle with theories and concepts is therefore initially internal and then externalised through my drawings, objects and gestures. There is a need to manifest and pull ideas from the pages read and other people’s heads and lay them out, see them, live them, act on them. It is my intention, however difficult to keep returning to the material. This position does not diminish the status of the thinking or that of the material but rather lets them merge and at times implode. There is not a preferencing of theory over practice it is embedded, related and entwined. It is a relationship of co-dependency. As I write and explore the dimensions of materiality and learning encounters within the research I am materialising and encountering through every action. As a researcher I am within a learning encounter myself as well as providing learning encounters for others I work with. The learning encounter is materially omnipresent, shifting and nudging as ideas shift and nudge. I hope to speak of material encounters through the words and references that I explore and equally speak through the material encounters themselves. The second reason is that the authors, theorists, teachers that I will refer to are seen and understood in a changing state of flux within my thinking. The ideas that they present ebb and flow through each other and they are satellites to each other’s thoughts. They are satellites that roam about in each other’s territories as I circumnavigate through the entanglements they provide.
Therefore, they is no coding as such to segregate these references but as in paper stone scissors games they all simultaneously challenge, repeat, coincide, complement and inform my research. paper wraps itself around the stone paper is cut by the scissors scissors are blunted by the stone. These are actions - active thoughts that enable my understanding and ground the research with an intention to write materially. The rhizomes and plateaus, the extensions and matter that flow through the references evoke movement and force. They grow and push through knots and fissures. Learning is woven through this entanglements and art mobilises and manifests its being. Can the material of the ideas that are so important to my research be lifted from the page and cut or wrapped? |
Kimberley FosterKimberley's practice as an artist is pedagogical, it doesn’t just reference learning, it plays with, embodies and encourages learning at its core. The objects consider ideas of collaboration and authorship, discussions about touch and encounter, and bring into active consideration issues of learning within social and participatory practices. Archives
October 2018
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