Not knowing empowers you?
TL;DR:
The creative process can give rise to a desire to know the end point prematurely. This kind of ‘knowing’ can tarnish the creative process.
Recognising what's emerging matters more than knowing where a creative process is headed.
Skip to the end for action prompts to help you let go of knowing and recognise what’s emerging for you.
Have you ever considered the way the creative process can allow something new to emerge?
Sometimes it is tempting to wait until all the conditions are ‘right’, to reach some undefined higher standard, and ensure all the ducks are in a row before starting.
But in the search for accomplishment and knowing, we (me included) might miss those ephemeral moments of beauty.
For me, to spend time drawing or painting something is a compassionate act of recognition. Even just 30 seconds sketching allows me to notice what I might have missed, right in front of me.
Painting also allows me to recognise what I can’t see. This might be a pragmatic effect of my position, for example. Or it might be - as was the case for my latest work in Aqua Limina - my gaining awareness of something lost, possibly permanently. In this way, artmaking becomes a way to metabolise change and grief, while opening up a way to imagine something more.
So much possibility within a mark!
And yet, a mark is merely a mark. Hence the desire to know the end point prematurely can take hold.
South African artist, William Kentridge, distinguishes recognising from knowing. Knowing, he argues, involves claims to certainty in the creative process that “have in them either a wish fulfillment or else a recourse to violence that insists on them”.
This framing brings to mind what Torres Strait Islander scholar, Martin Nakata, taught me about knowledge being a site of power relations, where hierarchical divisions enact control over. In the creative process, knowing can look like wanting clarity of the idea in advance, as though nothing ‘good’ can come without it.
But there is power in what comes before an artwork’s analysis and grand narrative. In the making, we can trust our body’s urges, where the materials lead us and our guiding hunches. Kentridge maintains that recognising these unfoldings matter most:
“To recognise something as it emerges rather than knowing it in advance is how it should be…. trust that there are things inside ourselves that we know, but that we may not know that we know, that will emerge in the process.”.
So, stay with the work as it is being created, explore the idea, find the materials and techniques that let it grow. And at the end, then you’ll be able to see what it says about who you - and we - are.
💡 Over to you…
What feels important for you to create right now, in your work or life?
What is one way you can experiment with that idea in practice? For example, is there a material you can try, a collaboration to explore or a place to go to?
If you were to make this experimentation as small as possible: when will you do it?
I love creative conversations so if any of this resonates with you, please comment below and lets explore together.
🔁 Please remember to share with folx you know who might also enjoy this.
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