Art in Ed

Here are some different threads that seem to have come together in that trembling space behind my eyes....

Thread 1....I have just been into an art gallery which is a co-op with a little exhibition of the members and I came across the work of Holly Webber . Her Mum was minding the shop and told me the story of how Holly creates her art. She takes photos of petals or leaves and then looks for the part of them that could be reconstructed into a pattern. Her patterns seem very geometric... when looking at them one could not pick that they came from organic images. So in a sense it is a secret inside waiting to be found....

Thread 2.... Meanwhile I have just been offered some work at a primary school - providing hands on science for gifted and talented students around the theme of sustainability, possibly integrated with some art experiences. Within that theme are some key big ideas that they want the students to experience/investigate.... connection, pattern, energy, systems.... etc...

So I have been busy on the net looking for hands on science in this enormous area... thinking about my own experiences and those experts who I can draw on.... for example, a scientist friend who is researching El Nino - looking for patterns in representational maps (temperature, water flow) of the Pacific as well as in the mathematics.... thinking of my own experiences as a research scientist in the paper industry and how the process from growing and harvesting trees to making paper to dealing with waste to recycling might be a microcosm of some key issues we are facing in thinking about sustainability.

So now I wondered about the notion of pattern...

How does a scientist think of patterns? Perhaps it is through looking for repetition, underlying principles, consistent properties across and within categories, trends, cycles, chaotic attractors....

How does an artist think of patterns? What does a viewer of the art think of the patterns that they see? Do we only see the result or do we understand the making of the pattern and where it comes from? What is the difference between a scientist observing the world and an art viewer? What might it mean to create patterns of life/industry/society from an artistic point of view and a scientist one?

Thread 3 .... Meanwhile on a forum on Integral Theory we were discussing the notion of seeing the world through a process lens versus a reductionistic (parts) lens. An example of this is how we might see a tree... say the gum tree outside your window.... do we see it captured in time - a tree.... or do we see the tree as a process of all its stages simultaneously in possibility? (eg. seed becoming tree becoming seed...) How might we act towards the tree if we are holding a different lens to it? So if we see a fallen log harvested for papermaking in the forest a reductionist lens might see it as a commodity... whereas a process lens might see it as life with a past, future and right to all parts of its life.

When I saw Holly's work these thoughts intersected .... it was a catalyst for me in making connections .... providing meaningful representation of my ideas (even if that is not what she intended) which then could enable new ones to emerge. I wondered then about how to orchestrate student experiences of pattern from different heads (science and art) and different lenses. How the use of science and art together might reveal exciting insights.

I imagined for the first lesson creating a transient art work.... hundreds of egg shells on the floor blocking the entrance to the room the students would be coming into for their sustainability studies. Brown egg shells which I carefully have put in spiral patterns with replication. Hard to see the pattern ... but once you do, you realise that there are consistent gaps to walk through without breaking them....

So now I offer some ethical choices.... to meet the barrier and plunge ahead, not caring if the egg shells break.... or caring but feeling one has no other choice and feeling that emotional turmoil.... or to stand back and do nothing in fear of creating damage.... or to study the situation and look for patterns and see if there is another way.....

Hmmm. So now I will be saving my egg shells...

And hopefully now some of these ideas will perculate into my own art!

Anyway, I am painting the canoe background colours so I can add layers and layers to give a sense of rocks but I was feeling I wasn't getting the shades and ambience I wanted... something between canoing down a river and in the sea under cliffs... I really hadn't thought it through... so was feeling a little bemused about what was resulting. I decided to paint around the canoe so I could get a sense of contrast and stood back...

The canoe hit me.... it seemed aeons old... layers of time. Before time. I had a sense that stepping into the canoe would be stepping into the prehistory of the earth... far more than just a nice connecting to nature or stillness/serenity. I have a face in the canoe in ripples of water and as I looked at it I wondered was it my face... or the face of the archetypal goddess.... creator/destroyer?

I have fish moving up the canoe and they seemed like they were on a journey through time.... were they seeds of evolution? Potentials realised or to be realised.

I was reminded of Future Studies, which I have been delving into... a particular technique for helping us to make decisions for the future is to consider the 200 year present - 100 years back in time and 100 years into the future. We can only understand where we are going if we understand who we are now and how that came about. But I am also interested in cultural models of evolution - Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cowan) and The Narrative Universe (Bocchi and Ceruti). To really understand where we are we need long term sense of the evolution of humanity... considering the 10,000 year past?

So now I wonder about my title.... can we can only negotiate the rapids of the future because of a sense of historic connection... to evolution of the earth, evolution of species and evolution of humanity.

This lady also represents a dialectic - a contradiction - how to live sanely in an insane world.... and the solution initially seems to be to find a space for peace and serenity to make her busy life sane. But with dialectics when we enter deeper into the cultural/historical/environmental aspects we can see there are deeper questions, deeper contradictions... and we need to go deep into understanding humanity to negotiate the rapids of the future.

So rather than looking for simple solutions to climate change, poverty, materialistic world... perhaps we need to look for complexity... excavate the depth... and this allows us to reinterpret our current reality so we can make a new one.