No Boundaries

I liked this set of work it was about things which just fitted in boxes that were made for other things.  I made lots and lots of them - a serious amount- but this one was the first and probably the only one I needed to make.  I think I was thinking about the arbitrary nature of the way we sort things out - hence the laboured connection to No Boundaries

I've just walked in and I'm not feeling very happy or comfortable. Alex from Third Angel was collecting stories.  I told a story of 'chance and flint'.  At the weekend, me and my good friend Tim were walking a field on the North York moors looking for flint tools. He found an amazing 7000 year old arrow head, worked closely on both sides and completely intact.  This in itself was a minor miracle but he told me a story about looking for flints as a young man. He had had a fantasy that through looking he developed a superpower - to turn all the flints in any field gold and make them glow so he could see them. I had not set out to tell Alex this story but it fell from my mouth and now I have decided it holds a slant truth about my two days at No Boundaries in York.

"I want to turn the things that matter to me in the fallow field of life into gold and make them glow so I can see them."

The No Boundaries event was in many ways very very good - the technology was impressive, each speaker had something to say which was interesting and well presented.  There was an interactive discussion taking place globally on twitter (I have to take others word for this) but if I ever needed a superpower to turn the things I wanted to see into gold and glow it would have been a good day to get it - that or a cloak of invisibility.

To quote Brecht "Something is missing" and as ever with Brecht it is the fact that the something is so unattainable yet not abstract which makes it so hard to achieve.  The negation of negation of negation or that space in the pencil case I struggled to find anything to fit.

To try and be a bit more constructive, my feeling about The No Boundaries event is not negative; it is more an horrible feeling that people think that saying something is close to making it true.  It seems to me that the creative sector may be great at many things but surely we are trained to make things up and in most disciplines 'put on a show'.  The problem for me in this is when we look behind the scenes and see the smoke and mirrors we are impressed but gradually lose our sense of wonder.

And that, for me, is the key; it's not the showing economic value, impacting on resilience, education or politics, it's not about shaping identity or creating a sense of space. Essentially art is about asking questions about what is missing, my friend Johan would call it the 'Constituted Gap'.  I will call it 'the space in the box made to hold something else which we don't know how to fill'.