Learning Again
“I’d like to try.”
I’d like to try sculpture.
I’d like to learn how to paint.
There is an idea, an image, a desire to move towards something I don’t know yet.
Before meeting the material, however, there is only a possible image.
Then the idea meets the material.
Clay has weight in the hands.
It requires strength, pressure, a gesture.
Color flows with water, mixes, spreads across the surface in a way that I cannot completely control.
The material introduces something that wasn’t there before.
It resists.
It receives.
It changes.
When I propose an artistic experience, the person does not only have to understand what I am explaining.
They have to do.
Take the material and try.
A form that seemed simple can become more difficult to make than they imagined.
The sphere gets flattened.
The clay deforms.
The color moves in a different direction from the one expected.
At that point, something opens.
One can try to correct it.
Add material, remove it, change the gesture.
Or stop and look.
I observe what happens.
The way the person takes the material.
The gesture changing.
The moment when they decide to modify what they have done or start again.
This is something that interests me because it places the person in front of something that cannot be solved simply with what they already know.
And yet we can find ourselves faced with something we do not yet know how to do.
This is where the idea of learning again interests me.
It does not mean forgetting what I know.
It means, for a moment, not being able to rely on that alone.
When working with a material that I do not yet know well enough, I have to observe what happens.
Make an attempt.
Then another.
The material gives me something back, and I respond.
The form that emerges is not only the result of an initial idea. It is also the result of what happened along the way.
Perhaps learning again means precisely this: coming close enough to what I do not know so that I can observe it.
Accepting that I do not have an answer immediately.
Allowing a question to remain open.
Perhaps this is what interests me about artistic experience: not offering an answer, but setting a process in motion.
A hand tries.
The material resists.
The form changes.
I look.
And I try again.
