What can art do?

I'm back worrying about what my work is useful for? Is art ever of any use? This is something I have had to wrestle with for well over 50 years now, and I think it's time to set out once again what types of answer have kept me going. I've also just been reemployed by the institution I have worked with for the last 48 years, as a research fellow. This will mean trying to show how my work as an artist is useful and that it has some sort of impact on society. Therefore the clearer I am about what is going on the better. I am very aware that many of the people that look at this blog are fine art students and that the question, "What use is this?" is one that often rears its head, so hopefully my personal thoughts will be useful and that they might help others come up with some sort of answer to the question, 'What can art do?'

I have for many years been an avid reader of the work of the American philosopher John Dewey. His book, 'Art as Experience' is probably the one that has had the most impact on myself as an art practitioner and teacher. The most important lesson I learnt from his writings was that art can be transformative. Not only can it be used to change behaviour at an individual level but that it can be used for social change. This is however a big ask and there are many people out there who would dispute this and argue that art can only reflect what goes on in society or that it is an hermetically closed activity that is always concerned with itself and its own rules; Art being about art, about aesthetics and the art world. 

However I believe that art can effect change, both emotional and cognitive and that art can promote first of all an awareness and then a critical evaluation of unfamiliar feelings, or different ways of thinking about the world around us. Altered perceptions can eventually lead to social change.

John Dewey pointed out that art is not about the objects made but that it is about the experience it offers. Therefore every individual is potentially an artist by way of their capacity to participate in this experience. I.e. it is collaborative.  This collaboration involves participation which itself leads to transformative change because participants experience differences in how it is possible to think, feel or behave.  Art is therefore both psychological and social, transforming not only individual intra-personal processes, but also interpersonal relationships. (Dewey, 1934)

This gives what I would call a psychological purpose to the art I make. This in turn I would hope leads to some sort of introspection on the part of people who engage with it and beyond that, that the engagement itself helps them towards new ways of thinking about other people and things. 

So how does it work?

I have recently been using an image of a glove puppet Sooty to carry a variety of ideas about the world and how I / we might think about our engagement with it. The idea was a very personal one, as it was distilled out of my own memories of being a boy and back in the 1950s been given a Sooty puppet to play with. As an adult who has been a professional practicing artist for over 50 years, I now feel capable of being able to return to experiences from the past and reframe them as constructions for thought and the development of feelings, hopefully in a way that facilitates the engagement of others. I also have to believe that in making these images, as others engage with them, the contact can lead to changes in people's cognitive awareness and the way they use feelings to understand the world. The objects I make facilitating what I have called in the past, externalised minds. It being easier to think or feel in response to a something externally perceived, than to have to compose everything, all your understandings of concepts and feelings, inside your own head. 

Sooty starts various narratives that others can complete in their own minds

At the centre of this approach to art making has been a growing awareness of animism as a way of coming to terms with the world that surrounds me. I want to talk with the rain as it falls on me, to listen to the land as I walk over it, to feel the stories of materials as I work with them, to be a bird or a cloud or a plant, or a stream and as I do/am these things, to let myself dissolve back into the world I emerge from. Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess some sort of spiritual essence, therefore everything; animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems as well as objects made by humans, such as knives and forks and spoons, as well as sculptures and drawings, are all animated and alive. This belief allows us to make contact with other things in a very different way; we can have conversations, make connections and engage with things in ways that don't have to be about separateness or difference. It sits as an idea alongside a belief in the Gaia hypothesis, that proposes that all the Earth's organic organisms and their inorganic surroundings are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system. As such the maintaining of the conditions for life on the planet, is dependent on an awareness and a set of actions that reflect this interconnectedness. 

Raising awareness is the first step in transformative art practice, these blog posts are part of that strategy, if only one person goes away after reading these words and decides that they want to make a change, then the work has had some sort of impact. 

These are not new ideas and I see myself as part of a global need to redefine what the artist does. For instance the shamanist tradition continues with work such as Pitsiulaq Qimirpik's, “Bart & Lisa Flowers”, this sculpture made of soapstone and antler bone, mixes a use of traditional mediums with images taken from the Simpson's, an iconic animation that has helped shape contemporary TV culture. He has this to say about his work, “Sculptures are in the shamanistic tradition. A lot of the visuals are about transformation, the body shifting into a different body, and the spectacle of transformation.” 

Pitsiulaq Qimirpik “Bart & Lisa Flowers” (2023)

Animism presupposes that bodies can shift and morph into different bodies, spiritual essences can be found in everything, this opens out possibilities for wonder, and gives an opportunity for us all to re-engage with the process of loving the world, instead of mining it for its resources. 

References

Preminger, S., 2012. Transformative art: art as means for long-term neurocognitive change. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, p.96.
Vail, J. and Hollands, R., 2013. Creative democracy and the arts: The participatory democracy of the Amber Collective. Cultural Sociology, 7(3), pp.352-367.
Goldblatt, P., 2006. How John Dewey's theories underpin art and art education. Education and culture, pp.17-34.
Dewey, J. 1934. Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch, and Company.
Brooke, S.L. and Myers, C.E. eds., 2015. Therapists Creating a Cultural Tapestry: Using the Creative Therapies Across Cultures. Charles C Thomas Publisher.
LeBaron, M. and Sarra, J. eds., 2018. Changing Our Worlds: Arts as Transformative Practice (Vol. 12). AFRICAN SUN MeDIA.

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Drawing as material thinking

Why it matters

Drawing it all together

Stained glass: Session 10

Silver stained glass

This was a short session held just before the Christmas break, whereby I mixed and laid down a silver stain that I had decided to use to bring two areas of Sooty's body into a yellow harmony with the rest of the figure. I had used the technique before and wanted to include the process in this much larger, complex piece as a reminder of its specific qualities. Silver stain is a chemical process whereby an oxide of silver is applied to glass, which when kiln fired, its ions migrate into the glass. A process that permanently stains the glass a transparent yellow. This means that you can get two distinct (clear & yellow) areas in a single piece of glass without having cut the areas out of separate pieces and joining them. The technique was so widely used that the whole medium of “stained glass” obtained its name from the use of silver stains.

The Sooty element of the work sat on a lightbox, showing the two plain glass sections

Painted glass panel with silver stain

Silver stain comes in a variety of yellows, the one I used in the image above being a very orange one. It is always applied to the back of the glass.

The two pieces of plain glass, now with applied silver stain on the back

Silver stain is very expensive. For instance Reusche Amber Silver Stain, if purchased from the Creative Glass Guild, is £50 for a 1oz tub and a pale yellow £24 for the same amount. It is therefore to be used very selectively. The two sections above were both made of plain clear glass that I decided needed to be a warm orange yellow, so I have used Reusche Orange Silver Stain. 

A small glass palette used to prepare the stain

You can mix the stain with water or oil. I used lavender oil, using a small flexible palette knife to mix the amount needed until it was brushable. Before applying the stain, the glass was oiled by putting a few drops of lavender oil on the surface and then rubbing it in and wiping it off with a paper towel. 

Brushes and applicators kept for silver staining purposes only

I used the square ended brush to the right of the collection of applicators above and the fan brush to smooth and slightly graduate the stain. Lavender oil on paper towels was used to clean the brushes afterwards, not soapy water. 

The two sections had to be turned over to have the silver stain applied.  

Hopefully once fired the two sections will sit much more closely into the warm yellow/orange colour range I wanted. 

Session 10 was the last session I attended in 2023. However on the 23rd of December I was knocked over by a car and had to recover my physical fitness before re-starting. I am just about there in terms of regaining the flexibility to work on a heavy large piece such as this, so hopefully will be returning to the stained glass workshop to complete the final stages of leading it all together very soon. 

See also:

Stained glass session one

Stained glass session two

Stained glass session three

Stained glass session four

Stained glass session five

Stained glass session six

Stained glass session seven

Stained glass session eight

Stained glass session nine

Drawing on transparent drafting film

New wine in old bottles

Hybrid sculptures: The next stage

This is the second post of the year devoted to future plans, (my new year's resolutions) and it is focused on my thoughts in relation to more sculptural concerns. As well as working small, I make objects that could be considered as 'furniture' for the mind. I think of them as furniture, as these are objects made to have a similar size relationship with people and are designed to play out roles within a space in a similar way to how I remember the furniture in our family house when I was a boy. Like actual household furniture, they can support *'tranculments'; objects put in drawers or niches or placed upon the sculptures as if they were shelving units or tables. This secondary display works to enable second order ideas to interact with the main formal construction. I have continued to collect thrown away items from my local streets, and to build constructions around them that shift between animal, vegetable and mineral realities; often using cardboard as the main building material, (a response to the ubiquitous Amazon deliveries and consequential need to dispose of many cardboard boxes). I have now decided that I need to begin varying the surface qualities of the objects I'm making, whilst at the same time preserving my constructions' abilities to have embedded within them or placed upon them, those odd items I find discarded by others, as well as objects that I make myself. (I think I will buy a robust blender to explore making my own paper, as Wangechi Mutu suggests.)

Making forms from cardboard and tape

Hybrid objects with found and made objects placed on them

Drawings of possibilities for 'furniture' sculpture

As I was drawing these forms it occurred to me that I could embed screens into the surfaces and make animations to play on them. I was in particular reminded of a radiogram with TV setup that my father once had. 

Radiogram/TV

Idea for an animation insert

I was drawing the furniture/sculpture ideas on brown paper to echo the cardboard aesthetic that I had been dealing with, so I decided to use the same paper to draw a simple animation on, then I could test out how a moving image might sit within the forms I was thinking about, whilst keeping some sort of material connection. The radiogram wasn't the only item of furniture I was thinking about. A table with its crisp folded tablecloth, always sat ready for action in my grandparents' dining room and I wanted to make something that echoed this. The table was also a place where you could play and dream of alternative realities, so I have been making components to set out my own version of my grandparents' table. 

Table thoughts

The remembered table objects of my youth animate themselves in drawing

These are in their own ways all imaginary tables

Some of the objects that have been made have forms sitting nicely between animal/human/inorganic ways of being. This ambiguity feels right and as I move on with this area of work, I would like to add in other ideas such as having some items being electroplated whilst also being component parts of larger forms, an idea I was thinking about a few months ago, but which I had to shelve because I was unable to stand to make sculpture due to suffering a severe case of plantar fasciitis.

An object with inserts

Realised objects exhibited

I've written about the animist world view several times, but it is in the making of objects that perhaps it is at its most succinct. A material can talk to you. As you work with it a common language develops that comes from a symbiosis between your own materiality and the demands of whatever material you are working with. It is this 'voice' that speaks with a tongue beyond myself, and that has a wisdom beyond the mind; a material knowledge. 

Cardboard form with chair

Objects talk to each other and develop narratives as soon as they are conjoined. In the case above the chair and the cardboard form evoke a missing human and yet within their own realities move on beyond the human, intimating a post-human world, where wood and cardboard will find their own way. 

Object built in response to a plastic chair

The 'creature' above evolved from a plastic chair, the arms of which became 'insect legs', another type of hybrid, that eventually had a cascade of plastic artificial ivy emerging from a hole in its carapace. 

Sometimes a surface evolves that requires a different type of approach. The construction below began with a push along toy and parts of a Barbie House, both found in my street. The black and white drawings used to cover the surface and respond formally to the discarded toys, came from Steve Carrick's studio, and he brought them to me to use in any way I wanted. A collaboration with another artist, is not that dissimilar to a collaboration with a new material. 

An idea begins

The idea evolves 

The idea sparks off related ideas

Forms begin to merge

Back in Steve Carrick's studio the process continues

These objects have their own language, one that evolves as they come into being. In this case I realised that the surface had to have its own 'say' and once I allowed this to happen, a totally new (to myself) aesthetic began to emerge and this is why I have decided to explore surfaces far more during this new year.

I am still using clay, and this allows me to have a conversation with the earth. It in effect grounds me and provides me with casts of my fingers, as well as allows me to make objects that can act as inserts or additional forms, that can be implanted or embedded into the 'furniture' as it comes into being. I also use clay to tap into my unconscious. As I squeeze it and pull it, forms suggest themselves and this is another way to find what you were not looking for. 

Because this body of work sits to one side of the research I'm doing in relation to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, I have also decided to collect some of the documentation together and make a small artist's book. In particular, because I use recycled materials and am keen to promote this, I recycle these sculptures once they have been exhibited. Their shelf life is very short, but the ideas live on in the sculpture's documentation. By in one way signalling to myself that this run of thinking has come to a sort of conclusion, it hopefully allows me to take a slightly different tack. 

As an artist embedded within a local community, I have also been having conversations and making drawn responses to what I believe are animist modes of thinking; types of behaviour that I particularly find in the ways that people engage with the objects and furniture in their homes. I also want to compare my findings with how people think about possessions who have been totally dispossessed of all their worldly goods and who have had to seek new homes in often strange new environments.  These conversations are being made alongside the making of ‘objective’ drawings of people's 'significant objects' in order to come to some sort of ‘understanding’ of what is happening, conversations that when returned to inform the direction in which I take the drawings. The resulting images are then used to help formulate what could be described as imagery for secular myths. The second stage of this work is to merge the ideas emerging from this work into the implications that I think are coming out of the existing three dimensional aspects of my practice. In particular I am hoping that this area of research will effect the types of objects that act as inserts or additional forms, that I will use to engage with the furniture sized 'sentinel' constructions planned. All of which comes under a heading of 'home is a belief', something I'm going to have to write a separate post about. 

*Tranculments:  a Black Country word meaning 'ornaments and decorative objects typically found on mantlepieces, window ledges and other places around the house where mementoes can be displayed. 

See also:

Wearable objects

Drawing using clay

Collage

Trench art

Electroplating as drawing

Stained Glass: Session nine

Fired sections of the leg, edges darkened with oil based paint

My previous painting session had now been fired and I needed to finish the last bits of Sooty's face; two spots for eyes and a roughly triangular mouth. However before I could do that I needed to check how the parts would fit together, so that I could allow for how the leading would work in relation to the position of eyes and the nose. This took most of the session, because I had to grind down the edges of each piece to ensure that I knew where these final painted elements would be. I have to do this with everything once construction begins in earnest, so it was useful to tackle one area to see how much work it would be.

In order to make sure the grinding was accurate, I went back to the cartoon and placed each piece on top, this time marking in white Sharpie any bits of glass that protruded beyond the black central line that represented the thickness of the centre of the leading's 'H' section.

Laying the glass back on the cartoon

Finally after fitting Sooty together again, I was able to simply paint the final areas in, using a lavender oil black paint mix and flooding technique. I had to work fast, because you don’t want the paint to dry on you and if your paint doesn’t flow, it’ll very likely blister when you fire it in the kiln. Each small area was flooded using re-mixed paint. Again this is important, in the time between one flooding and another the paint will dry and change consistency, so you have to mix every time, even though it feels as if you could get away with not doing this. 

Flooding applied to nose and eyes

Once the flooding had been done, I needed to fit everything back together again, (being careful not to disturb the eye and nose paint). I would then be able to assess whether or not the arm sections needed any more work; look at how the drawing of the leg was sitting within the new darker boarder and check whether or not I wanted to rework the area around the fused frit work that now constituted the heel. One possibility was to use silver stain to establish a glow around the frit edges, but I decided against this, hoping that the leading will visually cohere the various elements together.

The final part of the session was therefore spent putting the whole window together on the light-box, so that any final decisions could be made before the silver staining session. It was then agreed that I would undertake a short session to get that done before the Xmas break. Hopefully the two sections that make up Sooty's head will be fired by next week. 

 

The window is put together for on the light-box checking

Frit 'heel pain' section and leg which now has its edge darkened

Nb: I write these sessions up after reflecting on the event, using written notes and photographs taken on the day. The actual session was attended in mid December. 

See also:

Stained glass session one

Stained glass session two

Stained glass session three

Stained glass session four

Stained glass session five

Stained glass session six

Stained glass session seven

Stained glass session eight

Drawing on transparent drafting film

Wearable objects and Curative Things

In my first few posts of the new year I want to reflect on directions I am trying to establish for my forthcoming work. One of several strands I want to look at, is to explore various ways to miniaturise my ideas and I will try to use a variety of manufacturing techniques both commercial and hand made, to bring ideas to fruition. A while ago I looked at developing designs for tattoos, and I will hopefully be revisiting those ideas as well. 

 

Bracelet with votive images

I have written a chapter for the Palgrave studies in fashion and the body, for the book, 'Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine'. My chapter, 'Votives and Charm Bracelets: Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects', academically extends my research interest in votives and how objects help us to externalise our thoughts; the opening abstract hopefully explaining what I'm getting at. 

'The concept of a physical artefact acting as an intermediary between the embodied individual and the quasi-divine has historically taken many forms, including charms and tokens worn to ward off evil and ensure good spiritual and physical health. This chapter focuses on the artist Garry Barker’s practice whereby he aims to give material form to people’s psychological relationships with their bodies. Responding to themes that emerge from one-on-one conversations with project participants, Barker has used the making of votives and charms to articulate and materialise people’s health-related narratives. More recently he has been using the charm bracelet as a device for the presentation or exhibition of small sculptures and images that are designed as objects to help mediate between desires to transcend the problems of everyday reality and the need to seek wish fulfilment by channelling more spiritual forces.'

Making charms was an extension of my votive work. But the idea had a particular gestation. During the Covid Crisis I had been party to an argument about whether or not we should have the Covid vaccination. My belief, like that of most health professionals, was that if too many people avoided the vaccination, we would not be able to stop the endless rounds of re-infection. I thought at the time, if people could externally show that they had been inoculated, then more people would probably decide to make the same decision. So I made protective shield designs for necklaces and badges, as well as designs for charms and charm bracelets. The idea being that inoculation was a form of protection and that these items would operate as wearable protective charms, as well as a wordless way of communicating the fact that you had been vaccinated. 

Design for an 'I've had my Covid Inoculation' Necklace 

Charm bracelet idea

While I was designing ideas for the bracelet, I realised that my other ideas relating to various ways of visualising interoception could also be made into small charms. Pages of drawings in sketchbooks, soon became devoted to possible charms, and all sorts of forms began to emerge, many of them relating to past ideas that I had worked with. It seemed to me at the time that my entire approach to art making could be revised and instead to dreaming of grand gestures, everything could be miniaturised and people could wear these thoughts as tiny objects.

Notebook pages

I had an enamel badge made of the syringe on a blue shield image and it was distributed to various inoculation venues. Recently a local medical professional has donated one of these enamel badges and a collection of associated votive cards, that had used with people at the time of the pandemic, to the Leeds Thackray Medical Museum. The museum has developed a collection of objects that is designed to operate as a reminder of some of the things that were produced and used by the medical profession during the Covid emergency. It was good to hear that the badge had not just been used, but that it was felt it was also worth being archived.

The enamel badge being worn

In my various approaches to making things, I'm always fascinated by how a connection is made between what one makes and possible audiences. Interconnectedness it feels to me, will be more and more important to us all, as we struggle to come to terms with ourselves and the world that surrounds us. One of the greatest fears I have is that the vicissitudes of modern life will result in my isolation from both the world itself and other people. If we are not to make the planet totally inhospitable to our kind of life, we need to commune deeply with it. We need to connect with processes such as how its weather systems work, how soils support vegetation, how water flows, how air is formed and how animals survive and if that means that we have to return to older forms of communication and fuse them together with our more scientific understanding of how the world works, well so be it. We also need to develop a deeper understanding or awareness of ourselves. If we are to have empathy towards others, we need to be tolerant and to seek ways of communicating that don't simply echo the tight channel that we use for communicating with those people who are just like us. As we narrow the band width we become cut off from more and more people, as well as from other things, such as an awareness of why certain plants grow well in some places but not others, and of why some things thrive in certain situations but in others they fail. 

I had been trying out alternative ways to visualise ideas. The sensation that everything is connected also I thought, spreads out into how we envisage time. Breaking it down into past, present and future felt wrong; for instance South American pre-Columbian cultures, saw time as a spiralling interconnectedness and not a linear progression.

More abstract ideas such as this also need visual forms, and in response to this one, over pages of a small notebook, I found I was drawing spiral forms, over and over again. Forms that reminded me of ones I had looked at many times in the past. Spirals made by Robert Smithson and Louise Bourgeois, or by the people who designed the entrance to the Newgrange monument in Ireland. I had also been looking at badges made for pilgrims to wear. 

Pilgrim's Badge

As a test for how an idea could be visualised and then miniaturised I designed and had made a small enamel spiral badge, using the knowledge developed when designing and getting made the enamel badge for celebrating having being inoculated. These were distributed as gifts to anyone who wanted them. People liked the fact that when wearing one they would be asked, "What is your badge about?" and then they could begin a new conversation about what the idea of spiralling time meant to them. These are still available and I continue to give them out if people want one. The positive reception reinforced the idea that people's bodies could be like small art galleries and the more I looked around, the more I saw people using badge like forms to make statements about who they were and where they had been. 

From membership of a political party, via all sorts of other memberships, to tiny images used to elicit memories of visits to various places, badges are active participants in the communication business. 

Badge symbolising past, present and future, all experienced as one intermingled entity

Our bodies and their coverings can be like materials out of which we construct images of how we wish to be seen by others, We communicate using our eyes and noses just as much as we communicate using sounds. Tattoos, clothes, jewellery, hair, deportment, skin condition, perfumes and the general demeanour or feeling tone of our physical presence, make for direct communication channels with others. The article I wrote is a more 'academic' attempt to try and communicate how these processes might work. It suggests or points towards ways of making artworks that fit into the mainstream of life, rather than them operating outside of our day-to-day activities. It also implies a critique of a 'special' art world, where the value of art is measured in terms of money and status, as well as the prestige of the institution showing the work, rather than in terms of how well artworks can help us to connect with each other. 

I would like my work to operate as a doorway into ways of thinking that begin to forge connections between between people and ideas, as well as between ideas and ways of relating with the rest of the world. I have always thought that the more you have empathy for others, the more chance there is of eventually finding those others can become either friends or helpers in the difficult negotiation of life's vicissitudes. But empathy seems in short supply at the moment; if the making of art can do anything, perhaps it might help with the building of empathetic connections. If only the wish of a more altruistic world could come true, simply by wishing it. In the meantime, I will continue to make things that help me to externalise or crystallise my thoughts and hopefully as I do, others might also find these solidified thoughts useful. 

Material tests

Charm idea developed from the material tests

Bracelet charm idea

These ideas for bracelet charms were developed using images emerging from an awareness of somatic experiences. I sat with people and developed conversations about their inner feelings. These might be about their psychic state, or their physical condition, but most importantly they were attempts to make visual images of sensations that were normally invisible. Lots of drawings were made as well as small sculptures using clay. Gradually communication developed as images emerged. At the core of each conversation, as a form developed, was the question, "Is it more like this than that?" 

The tiny low relief sculptures that were made as additions to charm bracelets, were meant to operate in the same way as my previous votive images. They were objects that had been made from externalised feelings in this case, rather than representations of things such as arms, legs knees or necks. The bracelet that contains images of votives that sits at the top of this post, was the first version to emerge of this idea; it was a way of furthering my older concept of how to work with votives. The later more subjective interpretations were harder to develop and also much more difficult for other people to interpret, but following the experience of the spiral badge, it is hoped that people will wear them, and take pride in opening out their own interpretation of what these tiny objects could signify. More importantly, could they still operate as charms? Could they field off illness or psychic attack? Belief is a strange thing and it is well known that the placebo effect is real. 

Whether or not I manage to further these ideas will depend on how they unfold. Best laid plans etc. I have been sidelined by various things recently and have decided that by having a variety of projects on the go, at least some of them may prove fruitful; hence this new year resolution. 

See also:

Animism

Drawing and communication theory

Mythic Worlds

'Votives and Charm Bracelets: Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects'

An article on my votive making

The spiral

The tattoo