Your mission, if you choose to accept it, will be to give an informal presentation of your art practice… “Who am I?”

Here I am, contemplating my art practice before today’s lecture. What are my chief concerns? What drives me to discover? Where am I? Where am I going? Do I need to know? And what happens to an art practice when we’re asked to observe it, define it and put it into words?

Well, I have an idea. But, as with most things in my life, it seems the more I know, the less I know. So I will try to put into whatever words are available to me a little something about my practice.

Art is a vehicle that helps me try to bridge the gap between my inner and outer worlds. It is the ligament, the cartilage, the bone, the blood; the connective tissue.

Although… is there even a gap?

If we come to know through being bodies in the world, where exactly does the inner end and the outer begin?

Another question.

I make to understand. Or perhaps, more accurately, I make in order to encounter what I don’t yet understand.

I am increasingly interested in the body as the first site of knowledge. There are things we know, carry and remember bodily that don’t necessarily arrive neatly packaged in language.

This leaves me with a question I keep returning to: how might we give material language to bodily knowledge?

Even as I write that, I wonder whether give is the right word.

I’m not sure that I want to translate that knowledge exactly. Translation suggests something complete already exists, waiting to be converted from one language into another. My experience of making feels messier than that. Often I make first and understanding arrives later. Sometimes much later.

I’m beginning to recognise this as a recurring rhythm in my practice: make, leave, return, recognise differently, make again.

Perhaps the leaving is as important as the making. Life happens. I change. Memory changes. Things are forgotten. Other things accumulate. When I return to the work, I can’t quite encounter it from the same place.

Maybe return isn’t only something my work is concerned with. Maybe it is part of my methodology.

My chief concerns are around bodily knowledge — although I’m beginning to wonder whether bodily knowing is more apt — and how we access what the body knows, particularly when language isn’t enough to contain or communicate it. I believe our bodies are the first site of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we always have immediate or conscious access to that knowing. Sometimes something might be discovered, recognised or processed through making, and even then, there may not be adequate words for what we find. But there is still a discovery.

I think this concern comes, at least partly, from a frustration I’ve carried throughout my life around not being able to express certain experiences. I don’t believe I’m alone in this. So I’m interested in what making might offer in that gap. Can material encounter give us access to bodily ways of knowing? Can making bring something of that knowing into physical space without requiring it to first become verbal? And might that create a point of connection with someone else who recognises something in it too?

What does bodily knowing look like? How do we access it? What becomes recognisable through making? And what remains afterwards?

Perhaps I don’t need to understand everything I discover. Perhaps discovery and understanding aren’t even the same thing.

Art is life. When I think about life, I think about living, and when I think about living, I think about action, movement, process…

I don’t know what I think.

And now I’ve managed to give myself another question:

If the body is continually knowing, remembering and responding through lived experience, then what isn’t a structure of remembering?

Hmm.

I’ll come back to that.