Yesterday I was thinking and discussing intellect, emotion and instinct. I was asked where does instinct come from and does it evolve?
I’ve started to do a bit of research into this. I’ve re-checked out Performing the Body, Performing the Text which gives a good background into performance within art history. I’ve also been watching the BBC documentary Born to Survive which attempts to explain where our instincts come from.
I’ve not finished either because most of today I have spent with the 1st Year Fine Art students in a workshop titled Stitch as part of their ‘possibilities and process’ assignment. I asked to be involved because I have no idea about Fine Art training at degree level and I was terribly nosey to find out.
Julia Faltman who was running the course invited me to be part of the workshop because I’d mentioned that my degree was in textiles. This made todays workshop interesting from the point of view of how the idea of using textiles was presented to a group of Fine Art students.
As a textile student the emphasis was on technique. Understanding the history and mechanics of the machines we were using and the various ways to adapt them to our design. First we had to show that we had mastered the tecnique then we could explore applications of it. At the time I fould this difficult I always wanted to push the limits of the process not necessarily with an outcome in mind.
It seemed like todays presentation of stitch in art was much more open to exploration and discovery rather than mastering a craft. each of the students reponded differently. Some were comfortable with basic processes and were confident with getting on and making. Some needed more guidance and inspiration and some had signed up believing it to be Sketch not Stitch and were begrudgingly sewing plain stitch onto calico and waiting for the day to end.
In a way I could sympathise with them. During the Textile Craft degree I began to feel that this wasn’t what I thought I’d signed up to. Everyone else seemed confident and able to produce functional outcomes. I thought about it too much and got confused in the endless strands of possibilities my mind offered. I wanted to make something different. I wanted to ask questions. Often I would make hideous failures that were neither pretty or ugly enough to be desirable to the eye. But still I got through it and I’ve learned a lot about the practicalities of making. Sometimes you have to try even when it is likely that it is over ambitious.
Another thing I came accross today was the book Hand+Made, The performative Impulse of Art and Craft. In it is a quote by Glenn Adamson (V and A) ‘Craft only exists in motion’
Is this why I have been drawn to performance? Is it that craft by it’s nature is performative? It is a process using the body to create…
