creative attentiveness

where do you get ideas? collectively we throw together words and images and story emerges

but its an interesting question for me they always seem to somehow just arrive…

sometimes with great ceremony – the flash of inspiration, the light bulb going on, expecting a fanfare
sometimes they slip in the backdoor and have been rattling around in the pantry making themselves a cup of tea before i even register them…

i find motion is a good trigger [biking for miles, dancing, battling weeds in the garden – letting the body go in intense physicality somehow frees the mind to play over initially what is uppermost in the list of ‘To Do’ but then to range wider down more obscure tangential tracks

travel fascinates me the process of exploration - the senses are open, absorbing detail, hands are touching, ears are tuned, eyes are really looking…

be it on a bicycle, boards, swimming,driving or flying the sense of movement definitely becomes a catalyst for the imagination. James K Baxter [poet] mentioned this in his account of the trip a group of artists did into the Southern Alps
‘dislocation as a means of tapping into the creative process…’

dis – location, how you locate yourself, being in the local environment[in may my notebook shows a picture of four silhouettes in a car – mountain in the bacground]
words: drive around nz, interview celebs, takes a car around information super highway, locations, interview the passengers [driving oil prices up] overlay images, mapping software, invis avatars as gps references…

these are thoughts i promoted that collectively lead to Trip the Light Fantastic [in itself a road trip of story - complete with postcards!]


i always, always, always ‘diary’ my process – that is i constantly draw things literally there or imaginary, write down events, ideas, scribble notations to earlier ideas – note colours, arrangements of things, doodle around words – add arrows, stars and exclamation marks

over the first few days of scanz my notebook attempts to show through drawings the beauty of the powhiri and my explorations of the dried seed pods at the campus and my playing with the ideas of essence, presence, reflection, flow and locating self with various compasses [physical, elemental, insubstantial]

here are my notes [dated 06 07 2006] which eventually surfaced as the work in progress ‘familiar features’
photos of empty boards with face holes
avatars are famous faces, or icons of country
show is stages in different countries
visitor in own country
stories of location – make you local
walking into frame of kiwiana
familiar features

Not Porn

Someone asked Vicki 'where do you get your ideas?'


In today's associative jamming/ruminating process, we discovered some group symmetries and found some shop names:

Seemingly, 2 northern ABCers are born under astrological water signs. Bear with me. Astrology isnt just for the simple minded. Its a great antidote to religion and an excellent parlour game. 2 southern ABCers are characterised as fire signs. Hence 'Fire & Ice' which prompted Len's recollection of the Robert Frost poem:

Fire and Ice

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.


Vicki muttered 'Wing & Prayer' and I wondered what kind of shop that would be. What would it sell? Vicki thought just one solitary wing, but maybe unlimited prayers. We ran with this.

If 4 astrologically susceptible women owned an online shop, and happened to be fire & water signs, what would they call it? 'Wet and Warm.' I reckon that sounds like a porn shop. So you'd have to make a point, especially if your shop is on the internet where apparently 40% of content is pornography, to state otherwise and so the shop would end up being: 'Wet & Warm: Not Porn!"

But all of this was taking us further and further away from the Victorian cutouts, or was it?

resurrection

tonight we agreed to start using this blog as a development tool : ) so i thought i'd post to start warming it up ... we have been talking about "familiar features" our work-in-progress, to be shown at the dunedin fringe in early october, & also stumbled on another idea for a show ...

it has been a bad technology day out there in cyberspace. starting with the polytech's firewall not being opened for my workshop this morning and continuing through internet outages in wellington, power cuts in hari hari and mail delivery problems in london ... it's a wonder we ever manage to get anything done at all!!!