Make art, pay attention to what you make and to what happens when you make it.
Introduction
Moving Space draws on ideas and practices from experiential learning, the arts therapies and caregiving to explore art making as a way to explore and express personal experience. There is a particular focus on using the arts to promote health and wellbeing.
Background
Work here has been developed through 40+ years of professional work with experiential and outdoor learning in a variety of education, therapy and care settings in the UK, EU and USA, guided by professional training as a teacher, counsellor and HCPC registered Drama and Movement Therapist, and supported by a decade of personal art practice researching arts for health indoors and out.
This is the personal site of Chris Reed aimed at sharing practices and theories that might support the personal and professional practices of anybody visiting the site.
Why Art as Research?
Research as a singular descriptor brings together a lot of the ideas and practices that comprise the content of the site.
Art making is…
research (v.)
1590s, “to investigate or study (a matter) closely, search or examine with continued care,” from French recercher, from Old French recercher “to seek out, search closely,” from re-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see re-), + cercher “to seek for,” from Latin circare “to go about, wander, traverse,” in Late Latin “to wander hither and thither,” from circus “circle” (see circus).
It describes art as a verb, a doing thing. It supports the idea of art making as an intentional and concerted search or investigation. It supports the idea of it being a bit of an adventure, a wandering journey where we don’t know what we are going to find. It supports the idea of having a circular or recursive quality. What we find in our search feeds forward into the next act of searching and finding. It also has, through ‘circus’, connections to performance.
It supports the idea of art making as a way of researching personal experience. This emerges directly out of experiential learning and the arts therapies. It focuses on the process of making art rather than the product made. In this, it can promote wellbeing, make art a form of experiential learning, and when done outdoors, deepen and expand the experience of being outdoors.
The site is designed to support the act of art making as a form of practice research used to explore and express personal experience. I have tried to develop a comprehensive academic approach, with ongoing themes and topics, but my best-laid plans have too often been disrupted by work and life. I intend to write weekly material that follows my current arts practice and research interests and develop themes retrospectively through collections of work based on emergent themes.
Wish me luck. 🤞🏽
Please feel free to share your experiences or seek collaboration or discussion through the contacts below.
Thanks
Chris Reed
m – +44 7484 663 516
Chris is semi-retired and lives in N Cumbria in the UK.
Moving Space 