Developing My Creative Practice (towards an Un-Museum?)

This year, I have a grant from Arts Council England, to develop my creative practice. I’m massively excited about this, and grateful, and surprised and daunted, and spilling over with thoughts and questions.

For myself, and for anyone interested who’s on a similar path right now, I’m going to try to keep some regular notes here. A blog of sorts but not quite as well honed. More of an open notebook. And maybe I’ll use some audio and video as containers that give a sense of where I’m heading while I’ve got thoughts that aren’t fully formed yet.

It feels like a lot, here at the beginning, and like I’d better come up with something ground breakingly innovative now I’ve got some funding to do Thinking and Exploring. And more realistically, I know it’s simply an important chance to think. Which feels very lucky, and a bit fizzy and liberating, and like I should have done this sooner. It also reminds me how much I have always worked best when I’m on a project in which I have no idea where it or I will land by the end. Not that there’s ever an end exactly.

Here we are at the beginning then, of permission to Develop. How to start…..

Thing 1 : The first thing I realise I’ve had to do is to allow myself to identify as ‘creative’ and having a ‘practice.’ I only encountered the phrase ‘creative practice’ a few years ago and it’s always been what I perceived other people have or do. So in a way, receiving this grant has been a validation that I do in fact have a creative practice and it’s alright to say so and spend some time working on it.

Thing 2 : Try to go deeper into what I said was going to do in my application, blow it all up a bit and then put it back together again.

Here’s what I’m trying to explore…..

What possibilities live in the space between museum exhibit, art installation and experience design?

I hope that this space is about people exploring ideas in motion. Not, here’s a piece of art or something we know in science and here’s how we’re finding ways to make this interesting and accessible to you - but here’s an experience that is a process in motion. Something generative rather than protective, and needs you, the viewer/listener/participant to be part of it. Because who is the ‘we’ presenting this work and these ideas anyway?

I also hope this in-between space is about equity. Well I don’t just hope, it has to be. After years working in areas of culture that are perceived to be, and are in reality, often held very tightly by a self appointed club of knowledge holders, (classical music, particle physics, museum objects, science) - I am interested in how we dismantle inherited hierarchies of power and knowledge and how we design experiences outside of institutional narratives. And at the same time, not creating things that are SO clever and delighted with how interdisciplinary they are that they forgot to design with the audience needs in mind.

It’s about accessing and co-generating knowledge somehow. Although I’m not sure I actually mean ‘knowledge’ right now. Where do people go to encounter ideas, new knowledge. Was it once museums? Libraries? Is it still? Or do we go online, to social media? Different people go to different places, of course there’s no one answer for everyone. The General Public does not exist. So where pillars of knowledge were literally built around collections of objects in early museums, what is beyond those problematic pillars today and tomorrow? The Un-Museum, the dynamic, generative, idea space, owned by nobody and everybody?

From years of variously being a creative director, a writer, voice director, script editor, producer, curator, Director of Impossible Projects, outreach officer….. I have so many threads and ideas and questions that need time to be gathered up and combed through, for the most persistent, stickiest and interestingly most tangled thoughts to get some air and be properly attended to.

I’m going back through notebooks, scribbles in margins, notes on my phone, conversations started and never finished, and pulling them all into this in between space to poke and prod them for a while, and put different ideas next to each other to see how they look.

I don’t know if this will develop towards a unique sort of hybrid practice, nor am I sure that matters exactly. There are many people out there doing research into inter-disciplinarity, ways of knowing, entangled systems, art science intersections…. but the point about a personal creative practice, I think, that it is about whatever comes together in you, in your unique perceptive story, and the things that have shaped you and the things you notice. So this isn’t about me trying to find a novel research question, it’s about me finding the runway lights to guide my own practice, grounded in the why of it.

I’ve always occupied the in-between spaces, without meaning to, initially, and then more deliberately as I got older and realised how useful and generative it is to be the outsider on the inside. I’ve always been the anomaly in my areas of work - the unexpected physicist in the animation studio, the arts person in the science centre, the performer in the research lab. And now I have the language for it, I guess it all makes some sort of sense, because it turns out I’m in between in most things - like, a gender binary is meaningless for me, and my body is queer all round, with ME and fibromyalgia requiring me to navigate a path through social culture, party and play that finds me somehow in-between deeply entrenched introvert and extrovert boxes and expectations.

Part of me wondered about sharing all of this in the context of developing my creative practice. But I think it maybe helps with some sense making here at the start.

So here’s a bundle of threads. Some are about what it is to be in an organisation, and the changes we need. Some come directly from my last 5 years as Creative Director of We the Curious. (See previous blogs.) Others are more abstract and float in untethered space…

These are in no particular order, pulled out of notebooks and such…. and they are not even out in the open here for direct answers, but to start to coalesce, and form a quiding set of open questions for a curatorial/creative producing practice….and a set of conversations.

where is the invitation to NOT KNOW?

how do we value questions as well as answers?

where do people go right now for access to knowledge and ideas?

what happens if you design an installation entirely with the audience experience in mind. Is it still art? (Does that even matter? Is this a useful question?)

what does a truly open, shared curated space look and feel like? Can it ever exist?

is there a common thread or observation about people whose practices are both ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’- investigative enquiries about the world that are beyond current labels. How does that work interface with the world, with other people?

what conditions are needed for curiosity to arise?

what would a 3rd culture be that merges scientific artistic and equitable practice?

what if museums were as generous as forests? (inspired by biologist, author, Janine Benyus’ future city design )

is there already an established type of interdisciplinary practice that is about the sharing of a process in motion as an experience, not as an end point?

how do we stage experiments in experience?

how do we create experiences that are experiments?

institutions and ecosystems? (This is also a statement with a sigh at the end of it. )

is there something about the suspension of disbelief in a theatre that could be applied to encounters with ideas in science. In general?

how do we design projects and spaces with doughnut economies within the wider, pervasive capitalist growth system? ( influenced by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics )

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After sitting with these for a while, some of them years, some of them more recently - these are the questions I think I’m taking forward….

Thing 3 : to step out of my notebook tangles and talk to people occupying the in between spaces already. People who I hope might have a moment to spare, for some thought experiments.

I realise I studied physics because I was excited by the big ideas and questions, the poetic existentialism of the edges of understanding, the stuff that can only just be made out with the methods we have available to us now, or perhaps not at all. I guess that’s part of what pulls some people to be artists too. Anyway, it needs thought experiments because that’s where you can imagine anything or anyone into existence to see what happens.

Meantime, I need to think about how to hold a creative, care-full thought experiment space with people I don’t yet know, in an online Covid world.

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