Scrapbooking, by Emilie Flower
At home I am a filmmaker, working for theatres in artistic collaborations, and on documentary projects and campaigns. I work in a small artist-run studio in the centre of York, following an open-ended, time ‘wasting’ and responsive practice. The studio is full of craftsmen: printers, potters, painters, writers, designers and musicians. The place is sticky, scrappy, tactile and unpredictable. Sometimes it is empty; sometimes it is full and distracting. A different performance takes place here, one of co-working, collaboration, and different levels of cooperation, but always of making, where order is slightly frowned upon, emotion legitimises and the materiality of art-making in the face of other pressures is a cause for celebration. It is a place where time is as stolen from a greedy world.
Much artistic practice places an emphasis on actively challenging preconceptions; for example, to draw what you see, not what you expect to see. This encourages acute awareness of the conditions that affect what you observe or hear—such as light or background noise—and of the selective choices you make when perceiving the world. In Uganda, Susan Kiguli draws attention to the closely observed details poets use to describe a whole scene. In Bangladesh, Shohrab Jahan plays the role of trickster, always choosing to upend a conversation that was becoming too comfortable and asking deliberately provocative questions to tease and goad in order to perforate and expose order. Noticing means turning the model over and over, recognising that perception is a process of modelling and interrogating the edges in close observation. Using approaches like ethnographic walking methodologies and participant observation to populate a visual and experiential archive, artists record and place a lot of value on what catches their attention and how they, in turn, catch the attention of their audience. That is, they ‘scrapbook’ the world and then reflect on what they have noticed in order to develop a thorough and reflexive understanding of their individual preferences and style and the contexts in which these sit.
Artistic practices remain subject to the scripts that we live within, whether cosmopolitan, activist, bohemian or development. Even efforts to produce alternatives drew on familiar references. Creativity and art reframe, expand and then, inevitably, re-form order. In so doing, it can easily fall into the logics that serve to re-legitimate the social order, as well as challenging them. Pattern-spotting became a key part of our research; noticing images or themes that kept coming up. While the artistic activities of the workshops were underdeveloped as aesthetic endeavours, they were very effective in rapidly revealing the dominant cultural scripts that occupy our imaginations. Rather than producing new imaginaries for the future, they tended to reveal the imaginaries of the past, tracing a culturally endorsed aesthetic script that informed what we imagined could or should occupy the future.
While scrapbooking is part of the creative practice, what artists finally present to an audience is consciously derived, devised and considered in relation to the audience to have a particular effect. They have to go through a disciplined process of selection—or distillation—to form a piece. For conceptual artists like Shohrab Jahan, there is no point in introducing more stuff into the world without a reason. For filmmakers, performance artists, musicians and theatre practitioners, intentional manipulation of materials, time and space to make people think in different ways generally constitutes their craft. Paradoxically, it is sometimes through this process of distillation that artists come up with their most expansive pieces of work.
York, October 2018