(inhabiting)… a process of working with materials and not just doing to them, and of bringing form into being ..to prioritise process over product ... (attentive) of environmental engagement ... situates the weaver in amongst a world of materials.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold, Being Alive 2011 p10
Photography by Rory Daniel - installing feather stories 2022
Making safe spaces in public places.
Drawing on personal rituals of place making - wandering, foraging, collecting, crafting, nurturing, befriending.
Finding public places to inhabit as art – gaining permission, learning the rules, investigating the history, hearing the stories, spending time, sensing, connecting.
Crafting in conversation with materials - forming like play, intuitive, child-like, instinctive, I wonder.
Caring for materials as kin – without hierarchy, exploring working with more than doing to materials.
Mattering is my lens for being more attentive to the world around me as I inhabit and encounter place.
With an intimate sense of relatedness with clay – with earth – with soil - with mud - I participate in performances of ‘mattering’ – material enactments of fluxing, flowing, mixing, mutating and movement.
People participate as materials – in the eco system –gift me things, engage in the foraging and crafting, offer conversation, experience giving the materials a voice.
A co-emergence of relations between place, context, viewer, and artist emerges. – an aliveness – generative of conversation.
Studios, back rooms, hidden places become places for alchemy, wonder, experimentation, conversation, and mess. Sometimes they become the art – hidden away – accessible by invitation only. I ponder making the studio the work – art as a verb.
English as a language is infused with western anthropocentric patterning – I discover flaws – a future artwork.
My ethos for inhabiting place decentres the human and repositions it in an ecosystem of materials.
to be collected (clay, seaweed, branches, friends, stones)
to be grown (crystals, plants, connections)
to be entangled (plant dyes, bio plastics, alchemy, place)
to be gathered (textiles, string, wool, people, ideas)
to be treasured (stories, relations, collaborations, kin)
- to be mattering.
©2021pattiebeerens