Igloos and upcycling

I am back from Venice and today I installed two igloos that are being taken out of artic world at Weston park Museum at the playground.  After two months of working on the exhibition in Rotherham and writing my RD2 its one of the first times I've felt useful in this kind of way for a while.  By useful II mean handy but also doing something physical, making a change in the structure of the world - a change of space.  I didn't make them but along with others I'm instrumental in them getting here.

I keep telling people that Venice was like -walkabout - a songline and a travel away from the everyday of my life. I am pleased to be back and pleased my brain feels a little easier for the break but I'm also missing the intensity of thinking I managed in the middle of my RD2.  Some of that complexity has now become a short hand and I've relaised that the shorthand does not contain enough of the original.  I wonder what the walkabout means for me, if I will actually get somewhere when I come back to earth. At the moment I feel more like I have lost an important thread.  I read a lot of Dewey when I was away and I think this messed my thoughts up a little.   There is clearly something within art and experience that is very useful.  It links to Williams and culture as ordinary in that it prevents us creating categories of art or culture.  The thinking also stops us talking about art as process and art as product and these two aspects of art being set against each other. In Dewey art can only be experience and this is very useful as both process and product only exist as experience so they are not strictly speaking in opposition or in fact different.   Perhaps this is the obvious thread I bring back from my walkabout plus the dense  melancholy aesthetic massage that Venice inevitably gives me.

I set out with the newly found focus on the aesthetic and saw this as a line in all my work and came back feeling raw and exposed to the aesthetic world of feeling and seeing.  This connection is always to much and though I turn from it ironically it is always on the brink of consuming me, indulging me and taking me deeply into myself.  Its strange how I thought this was happening intellectually in the world of ideas and as Whitehead says the grooves we slip into but to be honest it has always been the aesthetic I hold at bay and am dragged relentlessly towards.

I need to focus on fieldwork for a while and be immersed in place and making in all its complexity  academic thought is just a massive distraction no wonder the field is so conflicted. 

I will write some field notes tomorrow about my work at the playground and meeting the architecture students .  They seemed a little lost I told them I hated CNC routers plywood and laser cutters and it was as if I had taken away all their toys.