RED SOCKS and RUBBER BANDS

a different reality

'a different reality of long shadows and uncertain shapes; and always, waiting beyond the edge of light, would have been the unknown, unexplained, half-imagined forces'
Baroness Greenfield - Tomorrow's People

I am finally settling into my residency at the Institute for the Future of the Mind.  A tricky job making work based upon what goes on inside other people's heads, but I have a plan.  I have three scientists who have agreed to let me coach them into using art-based techniques to explore their areas of research, with a view to making it more accessible and to communicate it to a different and wider audience.

I am also making my own work based around ideas of letting go, of working with blank spaces and seeing what emerges.  So far this has resulted in using syringes and microscopes to make drawings.  This also links in with my recent work at OVADA - in the wild wood, exploring notions of the unconscious.  In the Wild wood (see photo albums) is a significant starting point for the development of my work in relation to drawing from the unconscious, creating secret worlds of the half-imagined.

I visited another wild wood a week ago - the house of lords.  Baroness Greenfield was speaking on Stem Cell Research and Science Education.  It was like being cacooned in another world for a day to emerge into the daylight feeling that you had taken a journey into some wild and crazy place that had an auro of calm and discipline about it.  Surreal.

I have been reading Susan Greenfield's book - Tomorrow's People.  It is a place I would rather not go (and I like to think of myself as actively interested in adopting new ideas).  It is clear to me in my current work and from the piece quoted above, in Susan's book, that I am more interested in a world of the imagination, a world with a sense of touch, a world that can be created by ourselves rather than for us.  A world where we can be in touch with what it means to be ourselves.

 

The Colour of Love

Artist in Residence at Wesley Memorial Church working with Primary School Children to make religious and non-religious responses to the The Colour of Love - an exhibition of Modern Christian Art
http://www.smng.org.uk/COL/index.htm

For further images visit my other blog educe - drawing out potential and The Colour of Love photo album

St Ebbes Primary School, Oxford