Dear Artist returning to embodied practice
Are you asking what this medium offers, what it requires, what it produces in this body right now, rather than what it produces in general or in theory?
Dear artist who, at some point in the last few years, began moving toward making that holds you physically present,
Dear performer who noticed yourself leaning into the live, the unrepeatable, the work that exists only in the moment of its making and cannot be reproduced without the body that made it,
Dear embroiderer who found yourself drawn toward hand-stitched work with a deliberateness you had to pay attention to before you understood it,
Dear craftsperson who found that what felt like retreat was actually a form of discovery,
Dear illustrator who moved from digital toward paper and ink without fully understanding at first why,
Dear maker who went looking for work that asks for your hands and found, in that looking, something more alive than you expected,
Dear artist who is still working out whether what you found was what you were looking for or something more interesting than that,
This is for you.
Whatever combination of instinct and drawing-toward led you here, the reaching has been accurate. You have been moving toward what your body knows how to do, toward what presence in physical materials actually offers.
You find things in the physical materials that you had not fully registered before. The way a specific material responds to specific hands. The way fiber does what it does and then what it does against your intention. The way paint applied in a specific physical state, at a specific moment of the day, in a specific emotional register, produces something that could have come from no prior decision.
These experiences have always been available. What has shifted is your attention. The qualities of embodied creative practice, the unpredictability, the resistance to replication, the deep relationship with the specific body doing the work at the specific moment of doing it, are legible to you now as qualities. As things the making offers.
I have come to see this turn as a form of creative health work, even when it is not framed that way. When I look at medium as the full physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with how you make, what you are doing when you turn toward embodied, material, irreplicable making is attending to that relationship with new intention. You are asking what this medium offers, what it requires, what it produces in this body right now, rather than what it produces in general or in theory.
“What does making actually offer when it requires my specific body and my specific presence?” is a creative health question. And I think it is the question you have been asking, whether or not you have put it in those words.
So let me ask you directly:
What did you find when you turned in this direction?
What is in the physical making that you had perhaps not fully registered before?
What does working in a medium that requires your presence, your hands, your specific body at a specific moment, give you that other forms of making have not given you in the same way?
These are questions your embodied creative practice has already begun to answer. The answers live in what the work felt like when it was going, in what the body did in those sessions, in what arrived that you had expected and what arrived that you had not. The practice has been gathering information. The looking is the invitation to collect it.
What you went looking for may have been what you needed. What you found may be more than you expected. Both of those things are present in what the body-engaged making has been producing.
Love,
Kathryn