I have recently written an essay about the Artist Practitioner Development placements which you can find here
I am compiling new thoughts and some recordings and will update very soon…
I am extremely excited and have been looking forward to getting my teeth into this placement – this blog will act as a place and a space for me to think it through and hopefully to progress themes and ideas. I will explain more about the placement and what it is as I go along in future posts.
I submitted an application for the Cultural Leadership project recognising that it seemed to fit with some things that I was thinking about and discussing with other practitioners and I wanted to look for new ways to think in the future.
Things have changed for the Crafts a great deal in the past ten years; some for the good and perhaps some not. However I do feel that new fields of communication have opened up and opportunities for makers to speak up have become real. I am excited about this: making helps me to understand, the doing of it enables me to think and specifically about the world through the eyes of someone who trained in materials. It’s helped me to make sense of almost everything I do. To me my making rarely has an end point, it is instead a place and a space in which I do and think, it takes me beyond the studio and out into the world.
I believe that this is an incredibly valid way of thinking and that there needs to be more space in our society to take regard of this. I see this opportunity as enabling me to focus thought on this and how makers and artists communicate this further.
That there aren’t enough artists and makers taking part in the making of policy that effects their working practices and not nearly enough thought about how their working processes may effect change on other areas of thinking needs to be talked about. That there could be a lack of value placed in a broader notion of what we do as makers do is also a question. Can I remain silent and let my objects speak for me? Personally I don’t think so, though my work travels further than me I think that thoughts from sites of practice are keenly relevant and can only add to the debate which is currently growing and becoming more challenging.
As I write this my mind wanders to how thinking this through could benefit in a teaching realm. As a teacher over the last 12 years I have gradually watched the running-down of crafts education. It has been taken apart partially because it costs money, and partially through the inertia of huge institutions being able to respond to current thinking, but as we know most things worth having have some kind of cost attached – perhaps we need to consider real value and spend well, invest in our futures, think beyond the obvious and allow a place for development ?
I would like this space and this project to generate some concretion and traction around looking at the world through the eyes of those that engage in it’s very materiality, in it’s making and to open these ideas out to broader application.
This is Helen Carnac’s new blog which aims to record her one year Artist Development Placement, funded by the Cultural Leadership Programme and hosted by Craftspace.
