MakingLearning - Tumblr Posts

Bristol-based art-academia-community group MakingLearning are producing a series of patchwork poems - each patch contains a word, and is made by a different person. I just did the piecing and the quilting. MakingLearning may be Bristol (uk) based, but for the patchwork poem project we've received patches from lots of different places - not just other places in the UK, but also from other countries in Europe, and other continents. So if you think this is something you'd like to participate in, please don't think distance is a barrier! Get in touch, and we'll post a patch out to you. MakingLearning has a Facebook page, which you should totally check out: https://m.facebook.com/makinglearning

MakingLearning & the Leuven Conference

A group of which I am a part (MakingLearning) recently ran a practical, art-therapeutic workshop at the Psychology and the Classics conference in Leuven. The workshop we ran is one we have run several times before: Hanging My Heart. In this workshop, participants create ‘votives’ - small art-object treasures mimicking the kind of votive offerings found from the ancient world. Such objects could represent prayers for help with a particular issue or illness, or perhaps even a prayer of thanks for something now over or completed. Obviously, in a contemporary context we (as in, we who run this workshop) do not make these votives with the intention of leaving them in a temple as an offering to a god. In our workshops, the value must be found in the process itself rather than the dedication of a finished item. 

One of the things I struggle with most as an artist, and in general as a person, is the idea that my activities and projects could be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented. I have always worked with the latter model. I make because I want to actualise something; I have an idea in my head and I want to turn it into a physical item that can be seen, held, and shared. The first few times I was asked if I enjoy the various modes of crafting I engage in in pursuit of this goal the question baffled me. It was so irrelevant to my goals that not only had I not considered it, but the question itself confused me. 

I still can’t answer the question. I can’t tell you if I enjoy sewing or knitting (etc.) or not, but I can at least explain that enjoyment of the process is not why I continue to do these things. 

  Perhaps it is odd then, that the group I work with and in - MakingLearning - is emphatically focused on the value and quality of the process: learning should be fun. Making should be fun. The process of making can be more important than the finished item. The process is the part in which learning, self-reflection and discovery happens. Everything of value to the maker happens in the process itself - it does not magically spring into our minds when an object is finally complete. 

  You can see the struggle I have with process-oriented thinking: even when trying to think with such a model my mind immediately grasps at the non-physical outcomes of the process. Goals, goals, goals. My mind remains stubbornly outside the process. And, perhaps paradoxically, this is precisely the reason I value MakingLearning’s approach. Every workshop is another chance for me to try and understand this other mode of thinking, to try again to just enjoy the process, without thought for any sort of goal: to try and engage in a making where success or failure are as irrelevant as enjoyment is to my usual way of working. 

  So when we run the votive workshop, in which participants make votives representing fears, hopes, sadnesses, etc. mimicking the ancient practices of votive giving, what do I make votives of? 

I make votives of anything I want, of things without outside meaning, I allow myself to play, to experiment with new techniques and not worry at all about what the finished item might look like, because this time, at least, it just doesn’t matter; it is the process of making the object, not the object itself, which constitutes my votive.