Monday 16 May 2016

'do something small every day'

Today I found a box full of paintings from about two years ago. In the present I always feel that I have no idea what I'm doing, or where to go next. But if I look back at the traces of past days that felt like that, from enough distance, I see that things were happening.




Sometimes I think that everything that I want to work on has already come. I'm so quick to put it into a box and pack it away, or turn the page. Other times I think, no, this is how it goes. Something comes, and then you turn the page and don't look back. Then I find things again, and look at them beside new things.




Complexity theory (which I worked with for many years as an educational researcher) suggests that interactions through time - i.e. history - are essential for emergence to take place. Emergence itself is mysterious, in that whatever appears (ie. the song, the painting, the poem, the dance, if you work in the way that I do) can't be directly tracked back to any specific event or idea. But interactions through time have to occur if there is to be any hope of emergence; for the unexpected arrival of something unplanned. 

Anish Kapoor talks about 'the arising of content', as opposed to the conscious creation of 'subject matter'.

If I want things to arrive, albeit from a process that I can't fully see or control, I need to make sure that I keep the interactions going. The complexity perspective helps me to see why I can't necessarily make new paintings every day. Things can't keep appearing endlessly, without periods of food or rest. 



'Do something small, every day' 


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