Thoughts, images, and experiments from the field, studio, and sketchbooks

Creative practice as embodied research:
learning to trust ourselves as we pull new forms and possibilities into the light

Creative practice is an immersive toil in the fertile boundary between the known and the unknown. As artists we are continuously reaching across this membrane, into a darkness from which extends a field of infinite possibilities, pulling new forms into existence. This practice requires a deep trust in ourselves to know when we have touched something promising, to know when we have encountered something worth pulling across into the light, to know when to place an artifact of our feeling-and-pulling into the public sphere to be felt-and-pulled-upon by the multitudes of experiences and knowledges that others bring to bear in their encounters with its form. This trust in ourselves, in our ability to sense the possibilities of new forms and to give shape to their contours so that others may bear witness to them, is a fundamental skill that we develop through creative practice. Yet this skill is quite possibly unquantifiable and defies traditional assessments; the arts persist because they generate forms of knowledge that drive our actions even while confounding our metrics. We know the power of this trust when we wield it, we recognize it in others when we feel the contagion of an inspired thought or act, and we feel its resonant frequencies when we encounter artifacts born from the depth of its embrace.

As an artist who works in educational research, I often find myself at a loss: how do we measure and summarize that which is infinitely nuanced? It is in this realm of impossibility that I believe a creative practice serves as an essential form of research, unreplicable through other methods. The data are in our blood, our bones, our hopes and fears; they are held in the contractions of our muscles upon the materiality of the world, and in the chemical soup of neurotransmitters that reward and inhibit our actions. Through creative practice we generate an embodied form of knowledge, a trust in our movements across the boundary between the known and the unknown, and by knowing in this way, we are best prepared to foster the delicate blossoming of creative practice in others who are still learning to trust themselves as they pull new forms and possibilities into the light.

The Black Beam

The Black Cable

A new morph of the Black Beam, the Black Cable has now appeared. After a talk about changing abalone-urchin-kelp-otter balances in the bay, I overheard an old man mention thirty years or more of running transects along a black cable off the point of the old Chinese fishing village. He was wearing a t-shirt depicting the tree of life and at the base of the tree was him. He had just turned 90 and said it was a birthday present. Someone else piped in and said maybe data from the cable went back further, the military put that cable in who knows how long ago.

The cable was rapidly growing out of my mind and running through every channel in my body so that it emerged through each hair, standing them up on end. Just beyond the waving window pane, beyond the goose on her oiled egg that will never hatch, off the ledge held back from the bay by the engorged net of ice plants, a black umbilical cord running out from a navel unknown.

squidding with hilarious kiddos… the squid’s name was Cala Marie!

Sometimes disaster… but that’s what the low-expansion, kilnwashed, frivolously-slip-decorated drip tray is for. 

As I pulled this mess out of the kiln,  my frustration with the failure of the mold was trumped by the satisfaction of true disaster averted. Prophylactic measures against the scourge of unruly melts have become a major part of my studio practice, and along with the work itself, have become more successful with each refinement, to the point where I can open the kiln with confidence that nothing important has been damaged.  

This is one of the things I love about ceramics… the virginia reel of pure intuitive creative flow do-si-doing with the analytical impulse of design. These technical props are the invisible and indispensable stagehands that make the show go on.  The research and fabrication effort required for this infrastructure is equivalent to that of the resulting artifacts, and these utilitarian objects become my beloved partners in creation. 

Perspective. A gradient of diminishing variety and resolution that stretches 360 degrees from our specific location in time and space to a horizon beyond which everything is homogenous. 

Guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone

-W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

A Prayer For Old Age