Chris Reed’s personal art as research practice.
This is informed by 40+ years work in caregiving, experiential and outdoor learning, the arts therapies, particularly dramatherapy and 10 years personal art as research practice with a focus on health and wellbeing.
The garden
Does not await me
To awake
In the morning
And sit in the my favourite chair
In awe
It waits for no-one
It serves no-one
For no-one was there
At it’s making
It precedes
Us all
It told us
On our arrval
What to do
And is still waiting
For us
To listen
Wake up
Get up
Stand up
A routine
Daily
I rise
And move
Unfasten myself
From yesterday
A repeated pattern
Of detachment
a way of being present
eternally present
a way of clearing out the past
discarding
moving on
in motion
by being still in the present
a cure for depression
things get resolved
life as habitual resolution
Creation
This article introduces a number of ideas I have explored as an attempt to develop a basic experiential learning model to become a model for art making as research of personal experience.
This is the model I developed to describe my own working practice. It draws on all sorts of sources that are generally not referenced in writing I have seen about experiential learning, but through my own practice research, I think are relevant to art making as experiential learning. Experiential learning is assumed to be a form of personal research, and references are made to work from post-graduate arts-based research in Fine Art and the Arts Therapies.
It has seven elements, which are presented as parts of a circular sequence that returns to itself. In practice, these elements often occur simultaneously.
It is a long read of about 7k words, taking about 25–30 minutes.
I present it as a long blog post, click page 2 below.
Croci went into town
He went alone
The triad would unnerve them
Make them know they were not human
Make them know he was not a man
For this, a man he needed to be
So he put on a man’s clothes
And down he went
He was not impressed
Each flower or tree or beetle was it’s own
Yet alike
Like other flowers, trees or beetles
But the town
The human bits
Were just copies of copies of things
Things weren’t their own things
Things were largely identical
Underneath a paper thin page
Of printed words
Descriptions
Of blank verse by a blind hand
Someone wanted his help
Or at least they wanted
Someone to do
What he could do
They used big sounding words
But
Talk is cheap
So they wasted words
Capitalised, made bold
They bragged about what they would do
They wrote and
Did not read or heed
What was said
But a door had opened
So in he went
He answered their call
Besuited, sleek and smart
A con calling on a con
An aquisitive inquisitor, a nave
In the nave of a church
A maker of things meeting a taker of things
Croci would take a liberty
And settle a score
An ancient grudge
A theft
A stone stolen from an altar
Taken back from under their noses
They did not know it yet
After the initial noise
Their silence said it all
So
Listening, Croci entered their space
And was ignored
Entering under their empty busy chatter
Hearing themself thinking out loud
He knew he would be ignored again
He had told them what he would do
Was what they would do too
A confederation of cons
But being righteous
They were always right
So ready to be wronged
And robbed
For Ted Hughes
Croci liked Crow and
Flicking the pages
Tapping ones that looked interesting
The old man read them out
Croci listened, head cocked
Did not understand them all but
Said that whoever wrote them
Knows about crows
Knows their blackness
And their eating habits
But went no further
Croci
Flicked on to other pages and sat
Again, head cocked
The old man spoke on
Croci comprehended, compended
And collected
Morsels of poems
Choice items
First the eyes
Then the tongue
Then fat, flesh, bone marrow
Then stolen eggs, earthworms, insects, fruit, small mammals, amphibians
Croci had a strict order
Favourites first, fluids, then
Fast fatty food
When the ground was frozen
In the winter
This could save lives
So it was passed on
As poetry
Bird to bird
Eat…
Eyes, tongue, fat, flesh
The old man talked about
All the words
Written
About Crow
By people
Who never wrote
The poems
About Crow
And
Croci huffed
Phewph
What do they know about winter
In their warm houses
With their warm toes
And their warm hearts
The man who wrote Crow
Knew about the cold bleakness of winter and
His frozen heart
Had eaten carrion
To keep himself alive
The poems in Crow said this
Which is why
The people with warm toes
And warm hearts
Wasted the warm air
That made words
Instead of eating
Eyes and tongues
Whilst still warm
And moving
And in silence
Speaking
About
Survival
Croci said
Poetry does this
Chris Reed
The birds were busy
It was that time of year
Dancing, preening, chasing, breeding
Being pretty
Croci was busy too
Digging down
Doing dirt work
Being black coal glistening oil slick rainbow
Shifting shapes
Universal and bedecked by stars
The night sky
Constellated different at every glance
In the field digging
Heads down
The Rooks
Barefaced
Marlin spiked
Trowel headed
Looking for some sub surface thing
Long lost
Chris Reed
Moving Space 