Elena Thomas recently posed a good question on one of my posts:
Part of my current practice is in collaboration with a musician-singer-songwriter, but I am beginning to question whether it is truly collaboration or if it is a working side-by-side: does this count as collaborative?
This is something I have wondered myself when working with practitioners outside the field of visual art, but even then, look at my current collaboration with Iain Andrews – he’s an artist, but he’s a painter and I haven’t painted since the last century… What does count as collaborative?…
Perhaps the crux of collaboration lies in the generation of ideas between participants, which in turn may (or may not) influence the working method. Looking over my own previous experience, this seems to be the case. I have not previously worked with a singer-songwriter as you have Elena, but I have worked with a composer. In that instance, we did not share the physical labour as it were – I created the visuals and she composed the music – BUT we were working to the same themes, mood and overall plan that had been mutually agreed. We fed back to each other the whole way through the process, we worked towards the same goal. There would have been little to gain for her in learning to work with paper and what would have been the point of me trying to learn composition, when she was the expert? As far as I can tell, successful collaboration unifies existing strengths, in order to bring about work that no participant could have or would have created on their own.
