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