That sense making moment.
When assembling the unBecoming Control series in the spring of 2023, I worked with a sculpture library of Nano Cellulose in a range of shapes and color, sizes and luminosity. Working with Nano Cellulose, for me often starts with a drawing in wet pulp. The material and I begin a dance of response and care, as it solidifies it is still quite tender. It will break and holds the scars of my repair. It shifts, twists and hardens. Each sculpture becomes what it wants to be, and as I knot, my choices make a shape.
Making, with in the legacy of my practice, often incorporates some sort of call and response. There are repeated shapes and forms that become language of a larger idea, and then I recombined them into nonlinear, non verbal stories, or images. It can be found with in my large murals, flower arranging, accumulative layers the Aceae series, and the patterns that accumulate in my photography. Output documents my mind’s struggle. Shape and forms are delineated by my working through. For years I have talked about how photography allows me to see what I was thinking. Believe me, I am no pokerface, and my judgements can come through photographs. The practice of seeing what was unconsciously moving through me, has shifted.
In July 2023, deinstalling the third presentation of Unbecoming Control at Lord Gallery, at the University of Maine, I revisited my construction choices. They were made in a state of frustration concerning academic institution power. I had been very much trying to understand. As I cut the forms away, what remained bowed and sagged and still showed what was weighted, it still held secret functions of control.
Did anyone else see this? Perhaps not in the details, but as artist Bethany Engstrom was quick to point out, anger resonated within the work. It looked like a tornado. The work itself held a “embodied knowledge” from my sense making.
To process the experience, I asked others if they did this - sense making - too. As I built my next works, each were catalyzed by sense making. I would think through an idea as I was making or installing; some projects were more forced, and others were more fluid.
Could sense making alter work, if I held on to a specific idea, or was there a time where it became irrelevant. Did this matter to the viewer’s experence? As a viewer, research says, sense making has a positive effect on the consumption experience.* My interest lay in the artist’s sense making, and where it translated into the work, and in turn asked the viewer to sense make. Did one beckon the other?
Contextual reseach for making is a norm, and expected. What I was proposing was, not preresolving the research, but researching as making. In what ways is an art practice deepened by sense making. What is the role of failure and direction or pivots?
Realizing, sense making has long been engrained in my practice. I set out to understand what could be distilled. As it is a verb, as it in motion holding hands with any tiny or gigantic ambiguity that holds our attention, how can it be named.
And yet, for the 8 year old with in me, sense making was screaming to be named. I have sought to put value to the process. Yes, many of us sense make, as the artist Marina Yacoe speaks, we are sailing between the archipelago in the deep of night.