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This framework for making art evolved for me from the step-by-step process in printmaking, and also coding art, and also working for a computer company for a while, from their troubleshooting methodology and step-by-step approach to emotional responses from clients.
I really enjoy an ongoing dialogue with the work. When the work is painful or dangerous, how can I stay in conversation with the ideas for a long time, to generate art in response to my ‘dialogue’?
Assumption ~ you keep a sketchbook, notebook, or other practice for working with ideas non-linearly on a daily basis. This is a simple, ruder example of the distancing container system you’ll create and use throughout the process.
Inward preparation – Steps 1, 2, 3
1. Document your mental state.
Task : write in a sketchbook or journal answers to the following prompts. Freewrite.
Why do I want to do this? Am I trying to ‘fix’ something in the culture? What’s my emotional ground for this activity? What memories, knee-jerk ideas do I carry around related to this idea? What’s my inspiration? Why is this important to me?
2. Construct a “mask”, an internal persona for working with this material..
Meditate on what kind of persona you are engaging in as an artist with this material. Intellectual researcher? Perhaps you are being an empowered detective of the unknown, like Mulder and Sculley from the X-Files or their precurser, newspaper reporter Kolchak (of Kolchak the NightStalker). Or, you are a Scientist in protective gear, suited up in a quarantine environment to research some poisonous disease.
Once you have chosen your mask, collect a few key images online that represent the mask. For Kolchak, it’s a certain hat and seersucker suit. Perhaps a quarantine scientist outfit with hooded mask? I don’t know. Could be a superhero costume if you go that direction.
Print or draw these images and add them to your sketchbook/journal.
3. Gather appropriate tools.
What media are you going to use to process your ideas into artwork? Make a list. Pull together those tools before you start researching. Are you going to use a specific computer? Perhaps you want to get a hard drive just for working with this material. To quarantine it. What software will you use? What’s sketchbook? What drawing tools? Pull it all together.
Research – Investigate – Steps 4, 5, 6
4. Document-collect-research-meditate.
Collect a fairly significant amount of material related to the idea, and examine it while considering the filter of your own biases discovered in step one.
Keep the research material in your quarantined sketchbooks, computer drives, perhaps a series of boxes. Use drawings or other notes on the lid of the box to indicate what’s inside of it.
After collecting material for some determined food time– A week or two? Mentally put on your mask, and examine the materials you have collected after reviewing your mindset from step one. What have you learned? What is what is surprising? What excites you about this research? What of your biases are being challenged?Answer these questions in the sketchbook dedicated to the project.
5. The take-apart. (Supply need: index cards or posted notes)
On a separate day from step 4, assemble the research materials again. If your research materials are written out, cut up the text, placing one idea per flash card or post-it note. If a process is described in steps, break out the steps to be one of per Post-it note or one per index card. The aim is to see each idea clearly broken apart from the context of the larger ‘mass’ of the traumatic content — to pull discrete objects from the fire.
6. On a separate day from step 5, consider the post-it notes or index cards adjacent to the research material. Splitting a desk in half to have them next to each other might help stimulate thinking. Write about how “the whole” … “the parts” … relate to each other inside the research. How do the parts and whole relate to the culture as a whole?
Arrange and rearrange the notecards or post-its. What do you discover?
Assess – Steps 7, 8, 9
Assumption: during these stages you’ll be making incomplete things as a way of thinking outside of your head
It is best to do the steps on separate days. Spaced activities – as well as spaced repetition of activities– can yield better fruit then drilling through to get it done.
7. Aesthetics. How is this beautiful? To what aspects of the collected information are you attracted? What aspects repulse you? How does the information speak to you? What metaphors arise from the research content? What media do you think about using as you consider the information on the notecards or post-its? What jumps out at you? What conclusions might you draw?
Write in your sketchbook.
Make small artworks in your media of choice along with your written notes. Consider these ‘strong rough drafts’.
8. Invite an informal viewing and feedback session with both artists and non-artists. How does your preliminary sketching or conversing relate to the audience, in preview?
How does the information and your preliminary conclusions speak to the people around you? What do you discover about your own biases reading this information? How about your feedback group’s responses — do they surprise you with new responses new reeds on the information that you’re bringing together?
9. Post feedback-round, when you bring together all of the generated material and review and reconcile that material, what do you discover?
You don’t have to work the steps in order, but it helps to be aware of where you are.
10. Make artwork. Give yourself permission to take breaks. Use your psychological mask so that you are inhabiting the cognitive space of the persona you chose earlier in the process.
When the glassblower no longer needs the asbestos mitts, she takes them off. When you are done working, take the mask off. Take a moment to thank the mask, and leave the fiery content with the mask. Put it down.
Note: if, when you are not working on the art, you find yourself obsessing over painful content, come back to your research material, write down the ideas, and leave them with the research. If you obsess later, visualize putting those ideas with the research material. These acts compartmentalize, holding the fire outside of your mind-body.
Sometimes making the work is confirming the work has been completed. Sometimes you start designing the thing with an aim in mind at this point. Sometimes you loop through several steps building more insight and making more work, as the process.
Take breaks. Take care of yourself. Store the research material in a space other than your bedroom. The aim is to do better work, not ‘produce’ a ton of material.
You can do it!
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Jessica Fenlon is a new media (i.e. mostly digital) artist , exhibiting internationally since 2012. You can find out more about her by visiting her website : https://www.jessicafenlon.com