The Workshop Taken Outdoors: A Familiar Walk, A gift of moment
This latest attempt to redefine and repeat the 'preparatory/ previous' walk has been a critical thing for me to work through. That first outing with Dominic felt too prescriptive, too tethered to a specific authority. To truly own the process—to move beyond a mere draft—I needed to escape that echo entirely, to process the process!. The entire exercise now feels framed by Richard Tuttle’s distinction between things that happen once and those that happen always. The technical act of creation is the ‘happen always,’ but my real pursuit lies in that elusive, unrepeatable flicker—the art of making art itself. A walk is both so repeatable and completely new and somehow magic.
Escaping the Studio Container
My reading of Sennett, The Craftsman, has led me to scrutinise the very idea of the studio versus the workshop to inlcude location. The history of the workshop is one of containment, of productive enclosure. My current experiment is the deliberate dragging of that contained, productive space outdoors—to the coast.
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The Structure: The walk itself is the repeatable structure—the constant framework. B ut the crucial discovery is that no two walks, even from the same point, yield the same outcome. The external reality—the dog walkers, the open community—imposes itself, challenging the notion of private making. It confirmed something I already knew: my act of making is very private.
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The Preparation: The shift in location demanded a shift in ritual. I sat in the beach hut, breathing quietly, engaging in a conscious act of preparation. This wasn't about measuring materials; it was about tuning in, readying myself to receive a gift from the universe, something magic, something spiritual. This is the bedrock of the work—a deep, non-measurable commitment.
This frame of mind moved the work beyond simple description. Initially, I was concerned with texture and pattern—a necessary anchoring in tangible presence. But the focus quickly lifted to the larger sections of the landscape, and a far more interesting shift occurred. The scenery ceased being mere backdrop and became subjunctive space—the world as it might be, a site of pure speculation.
Sitting on that found bench, the entire time was spent nurturing this leap of imagination:
I started throwing out 'what if' statements. What if I lived in that house? What does that house hold? Who are the people walking past? What is this movement bringing them?
This is the translation of documentation into potential narrative/concept. I could distinctly feel people's energy. I initially photographed the figures in colour, but an essential decision was quickly enforced.
Despite the vividness of the imagined narrative and the feeling of the space, I made a strict decision that felt absolutely essential for the work's integrity: to separate the collection of form and idea from the issue of colour.
Colour is usually my foundation, but here, it would have been a catastrophic distraction. I was solely interested in the raw shapes and concepts. To enforce this necessary focus, I recorded everything in black and white. This felt liberating—a necessary excision that ensures the integrity of the collected forms and the captured ideas before they are subjected to the complex painterly decision of hue back in the studio. The monochrome recording preserves the concept in its purest, most essential state, ready for the final layer of translation.
