participants
“I’m not doing this at you,” Pete Homes says, “I’m doing this with you”.
We do the work in the silo of our solitude. In the cloister of the studio. At the altar of the desk or workbench. In the anchorage of our closed off space for making things. But what we make there is never completed. Everything we create is a collection of half-formed thoughts and fragmented sentences .
Until we share it.
Until the right reader, the right viewer, the right person, comes along and really looks at it.
Something in the meeting, something in their presence, something in their gaze shifts the work and finishes it.
It’s a vulnerable surrender. The recognition that the work never belonged to us to begin with. As the makers we are always only ever collaborators in the conversation of an experience.
There is a hollow gap in everything created. A hole in the shape of an onlooker. An audience. An audience is never made of passive recipients, but instead is comprised of active participants. We create a structure and they imbue it with soul and spirit. We shape something into a form. Into a body. And they breathe a pulse into it.
We learn to build temples in places of desolation. Cathedrals of safety and comfort. But it only becomes something sacred, something holy, something consecrated when we leave space for the other to sit with us in it.
May your making open you to the world.
May the hollow of your work become a shelter for others to be welcomed in.
May the breathe of the witness turn your work into something living.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
I love this so much. The whole idea that we really are never alone, and that life is a delicious collaboration.
The flow of this piece had such an amazing structure to it, too❤️
That is the ultimate goal, isn’t it? Connection; to self, to others -as you said so poignantly - As the makers we are always only ever collaborators in the conversation of an experience -brilliant