In essence, I tell stories and to tell them, I explore different methods of delivering them.
Some stories want to be an abstract video or an animated film. Others, lean towards more spacious conceptions like objects or installations. There are also those, which prefer to become drawings or scribbles. As a storyteller, I strive to expand the ways in which the stories can come about. Being a metaphorholic, I’d say it is all about connecting the dots.
To deliver a story, one needs a way to distill something rather complex. I do it by establishing relationships between various pieces of information, seemingly unrelated events, facts, general occurrences. I usually begin by asking two basic questions:
which method of art would suit best this particular story?
how to design it, so I can freely switch between the focused & diffused?
When I say focused, I mean everything associated with the conscious and analytical. By diffused, I refer to the subconscious and intuitive. Without a balance between the two, the story-in-telling can only be partial.
Most of my works, nowadays, demonstrate this unstoppable drive to gain a deeper understanding how intuition works in relation with the conscious processing systems.
Method, for me, is in sisterhood with research. When I design a method, I prioritise space for research, rumination, reflection & play. I feed my internal system with experiences to observe what comes out. And then, I act. If need be, I repeat the process until the story forms.
I am exploring, collecting, crafting, and testing methods of art. I explore how others approach or have approached them.
so… what is an art method for me?
The word method knits into one the two: μετά (meta) and ὁδός (hodos).
The first one is a preposition carrying 4 crucial meanings:
> temporal/sequential;
> spatial/relational;
> abstract/categorical;
> transformative.
The second one ὁδός (hodos) means a way, a road, or a path.
In ancient Greek, methodos signified a process, a path taken, a pursuit. It conveyed a process of inquiry that incorporated thinking and acting interlaced with 4 meanings carried by its proposition.
Knowing the above makes a lot of difference. It is too simplistic to proclaim that an art method is a specific, orderly formula of action an artist chooses to take to create an artwork. For me, an art method is simply a way of referring to what we focus on. It incorporates striving to achieve a greater understanding of engagement (co-present or temporarily / permanently alone).
Art method, therefore, never pre-exists an activity. It is what is created, recreated, modified, and extended in and throughout the process of knowing. And it manifests itself as an art-making inquiry (individual and/or collective; in a material or immaterial form).
Some may point out that artists often craft a procedure before an artistic act. In my opinion, it does not interfere with what I stated above. Procedures or plans act as scaffoldings offering some general goals for an inquiry. When the process commences, the artists freely jump across attempting goals, re-defining them and responding to feedback. They actively adjust their doing and thinking.
Art method, in my opinion, thrives in creative tension between future and past. We use the accumulated database of our experiences to discover the possibilities, the new. And we are doing it by connecting the dots.
I am also an artist-teacher
Yes, I am and I am a gentle upholder that we, the artists, create using a biological body (as a whole). All aspects of creation need attention – the physiological, psychological, cognitive and systemic.
Is there anything else?
By initial trade, I am an English teacher. I love sounds, words, sentence structures and meanings. Practising art has expanded the linguistic to such territories as pre-linguistic states and skills (i.e.: felt sense, dreams, hunches, etc.); abstract visual forms; negotiated, reduced or manmade systems. In short… all that belongs to the plethora of intuitive acts.
Hi !
I am a visual artist, a storyteller, art methods researcher & an academic teacher
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wysakowska / walters ’ 