Artmaking in the outdoor environment: Negotiating experiential and material complexities

Abstract

This practice-based research project uses a new materialist approach to investigate the relationship between the geological, biological and meteorological activities of the outdoor world and the dynamics of a creative arts practice. It asks the question how the relationship between the self and the outdoor environment might manifest in a creative arts practice in the British Peak District. The project has produced a new approach to arts practice based on the development of a mobile artmaking kit made from string, fabric, paper and wood, and in response to the topography and the wind and rain of Bakestonedale Moor. This mobile working kit (MWK) has been used to make site-specific drawings and temporary installations and provide artefacts for indoor exhibition displays. The research understands outdoor environments as an intra-active process (Barad, 2003) and the activity of its material components as a performance. The arts practice produces meaning for the artist and audiences due to the aesthetic changes that MWK installations bring to the environment. Such meaning-making processes are based on an individual’s subjective engagement with the artwork (Dewey, 1994). The emerging practice operates as an epistemic practice that creates and captures knowledge in the experience of the particularity of artmaking events, and such knowledge also accumulates in ‘techniques’ (Spatz, 2015) regarding the use of the MWK. The development of the arts practice has revealed a range of dynamic relationalities between artmaking materials, the outdoor environment and the artist. Such relationalities are exemplified by the connection between emerging material properties in moments of creative experimentation and their implementation in the design and outdoor use of the MWK modules. My engagement with many outdoor artmaking situations prompted the formulation of a number of experiential schemas as a way of describing the experience of the outdoor world, for example the relationality of distance versus proximity. It has also led me to understand the outdoor environment and its plants, rocks, valleys, hills and animals as a material complexity that is similar to the material complexity within artmaking. Considering both, the outdoor processes and actions of artmaking, as a performance, led to the conclusion that this arts practice operates as a form of non-verbal, gestural transaction between the self and the other.