Feeling a way through …

feel your way

  • to judge where you are going by touching with your hands instead of looking
  • to act slowly and carefully because you are not certain how to do something

Cambridge Dictionaries Online

Feeling a way through … is an invitation to participate in the work of art.  In a shared exploration of paintings and video made during the artist’s ongoing project of making sense of climate change responsibility, you will share your readings and responses to the artwork – through reflection, conversation, dialogue.  Come and feel part of it.  

Carole Kirk, Painter and Cultural Industries PhD Scholar

Hand feeling painting

Tuesday 17th December at 12-1pm or 2-3pm, Alec Clegg studio, stage@leeds.
Free entry, but please email to book as places are limited – c.kirk@leeds.ac.uk
School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds

‘Touch’ symposium

This Friday, I will be contributing to a symposium on ‘Touch’ in Art process as part of the Didsbury Arts Festival.  I will be talking about my installation The Gesture of Thinking, and about the role of ‘touch’ in interpreting painting.

painting

In the tactile engagement with materials in my studio, I make sense out of physical ‘sense’.  But if the ‘thinking’ is in the making, how can I share this ‘felt’ knowledge with an audience?

The Gesture of Thinking

“It is not pictures as objects of perception, that can teach us about perceiving; rather, it is making pictures – that is, the skilful construction of pictures – that can illuminate experience, or rather the making or enacting of experience.” Alva Noë

painting

This installation explores processes of embodied cognition through painting.  It aims to understand creative practice as an agential, corporeal activity performed by a body moving through its environment.  Through gesture, materiality and the use of tools, visual knowledge emerges in a process of artistic labour.  Painting, in this laborious process, is thinking – “in that instant when his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’”.  Merleau-Ponty

Details: Alec Clegg studio, stage@leeds, School of Performance and Cultural Industries.  Thursday 9th May, 11-3.  Drop in, no need to book. Free Entry.