flexibility
We tend to think of creativity as a force, an impetus, perhaps even a will to power. We see it as something firm and unshakable. The push and pull of a tension that requires you to dig your heals in. We think we must be staunch and stiffened. Firm and unyielding. And yet, “if we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend”, Alain de Botton says, “we are far more likely to” find ourselves snapping.
The more you make things the more you realize that the work, the material, and process aren’t asking you to be rigid. They’re asking you to be responsive. To shift and sway and pivot. To be pliable and workable. To be open and receptive. Perceptive and impressionable.
Creativity asks us to find an inner fluidity. To turn a march into a dance of poise and grace.
The material resists us. The vision formed mentally becomes something different in the physicality of its shaping. Ideas change. All our best laid plans get interrupted. Every move made in the process of making is an encounter with the unexpected. In these moments persistence and resilience are not matters of tautness and immovability. Quite the contrary. Perseverance here is something soft and flexible.
“Flexibility is its own kind of strength”, Ryan Holiday says. Our suppleness is what gives us the strength to persist within the ways that the work insists that we approach it differently. Somewhere between accidents and intentions, between mistakes and meant to be, between fucking-up and a phenomenal discovery, the work teaches you things. Things that are stranger and truer and more interesting than what you initially envisioned.
The work asks you to bend into the shape of your own possibilities.
May you bend without breaking.
May you find strength in your softness.
May the work always reshape you gently.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
***special thanks to Susanne Helmert for sending me fragments of her photograms to collage with, some were used in “these intentional acts”
Having watched you make it, and then knowing that some of this material comes from an actual vintage scrapbook makes "importance to the name" a very special piece. I especially appreciate the precise cuts that reveal the old handwriting in the underlayers. A casual observer would not know of the multiple small choices that tie together the color scheme, as well. As with all your work, the texture can't be fully appreciated on a monitor screen. Very nice work!!
I love how this writing, talking about art, is talking about how to live. Love this.