I’ve been working on a sculpture for the past week. At least, I think it’s a sculpture.
It shouldn’t really matter what you call it but the need to give it a category and stick it in a metaphorical box feels pretty normal and hard to resist.
I think it’s a self-imposed need to legitimise whatever it is I’m working on, by knowing what purpose it serves.
But what if it doesn’t need to serve a purpose?
This particular piece of work started out only because I saw some work by an artist blacksmith called Cameron Pearson, a student on the BA Artist Blacksmithing Level 5 course at Hereford College of Arts.
Honestly, if I was 25 years younger and knew what I knew now I’d be taking that course instead of Music Technology, which ultimately landed me in a burnout-inducing media career instead of being the successful music producer I dreamed of becoming.
But hey, I am where I am (and who I am) because of all the choices I made and it’s pure insanity to wish otherwise.
So from a distance I watch people like Cameron and instead of wishing my life away, which saps my energy to do anything, I try and take inspiration, using that as fuel to get into something.
Looking at one of his recent pieces led me to want to experiment with some particular techniques - arcs and tenon joints - to see what I could do.
Tenon joints, if you don’t know, are when you forge down one end of a piece of steel to form a smaller, cylindrical protrusion which you then ensure fits into a hole punched in another piece, long enough that it protrudes out the other side.
Heat it up again, smash it (with care) until it expands into the hole and you should have a nice, tight join.
So I started off freehand bending out a square bar until it made a circle then made another, half circle that I joined to that using the tenon technique.
That was as far as I’d planned to go but as I looked at it, I could see that repeating the process and putting another curve on the other side, at 90 degrees from my original piece, would probably look pretty neat.
And it meant being able to do another tenon, in a slightly awkward place, which was a nice challenge.
As is often the case, for some reason the second was a ridiculous mess compared to the first.
I mucked it up, hit multiple impasses and paused for a day or two to figure out how to address it before coming back and finally get it finished.
But I did and there it was, this pleasing but functionless sphere, handforged out of metal.
I was pretty chuffed, my kids thought it was cool, and it sat on my kitchen work surface for a few days.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it next. I was drawing a blank. It didn’t serve any particular purpose and I didn’t have a sense of what it should look like at the end, so I just stopped.
Then I had a conversation with Pete Brasspenninx of Phyre Forge
Pete is another artist blacksmith whose work I admire and I interviewed him for the series of talks I’m producing (listen to the conversation with Joy Fire here).
His work is at a whole new level that I’m happy just to appreciate, but even if I’m not aiming to be that skilled it still inspires and informs what I do and I was very happy he was willing to talk to me.
That conversation will be up online soon and I won’t try to paraphrase it but one thing he said particularly struck me:
“Art is not a finished object, art is the process.”
He explained that, in his mind, the value and purpose of producing a piece of work is in the production.
“Art occurs in the moment when I’m creating. When I’m having the discoveries or trying something new. Those little moments that are only experienced by me in the the process. That’s where the art’s at.”
It’s the experience of the creator, as they are doing it.
The finished work? He’s not that attached to it, he said.
If people want to buy something he’s made, that’s great, but the reason the pieces exist in the first place is because he wanted to go through the process of making them - not because he wanted the finished object to exist.
“You get done, I just have a thing that just sits on a table. I have the object that came from my time but that can’t be sold. You can sell a hunk of metal and people can think it’s pretty but they don’t have any of those experiences or memories or moments that occurred in that piece. Those are mine.”
This is one of those trains of thought that is simultaneously obvious and a little mind-blowing.
In a world that obsesses about image and presentation, where everything can be commoditised, I often find it hard to create for the sake of creating.
It’s been a blocker for me in so many areas - whether it’s making knives, producing music or even writing, my habitual way of thinking is to start out with a sense of needing to get to the end.
And more than that - to fixate on the value of the end result, specifically in the eyes of other people.
Often I put so much pressure on that outcome being unique and/or widely loved (which might be a contradiction in itself) that I stop before I’ve even got going.
Take this project I’m working on in this very moment - writing about blacksmithing as a lens for understanding ourselves and the world: although the real reason it started was because I wanted to explore something - for me - I had this idea that other people needed to be introduced to the multi-faceted art of blacksmithing and I needed to make it interesting to them.
But what happens if that becomes my goal?
If I fixate on that need for external validation, seeking approval from out there, it’s natural that I’d lose touch with what’s inspiring to me.
And if I’m focusing on what I think some amorphous group of people out there might find interesting, how do I know if it’s the right thing?
Ultimately, the only measure will be in how it’s received once it’s done - how many people ‘like’ what I produce or how many comments and messages I get about it.
None of this is helped by the fact I started my career in digital marketing - a profession obsessed with understanding and profiling your target market, using that data to direct your effort, which is only validated by the results it produces.
But this is a route to homogeneity and the death of all creativity.
Because real creativity is the expression of a need or idea that only you have. It’s not just doing something that’s different to what other people are doing. That’s just reacting to someone or something else for the sake of differentiating.
Nope, creativity is acting on an intangible feeling or urge that you put outside of you through some medium.
The medium might be steel, clay, dancing or baking - it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you, a unique and individual expression of humanity wanted to take something that is inside of you and give it form.
“Art as a process” seems to mean totally committing to that idea, and to the process as the expression, not the end result.
Instead of focusing on the completion of a tangible form, for the sake of producing a form, it means going all out on expressing yourself through that work.
Again, there seems to be another trap here - of getting sucked into feeling the need to express a ‘you’.
Directing your energy and attention away from experiencing and exploring the process and medium, into focusing on projecting an aspect of yourself into some presentable ‘thing’ - this just brings us back to fixating on a finished object.
What I think Pete might be talking about, or at least how I like to interpret it, is that by straightforwardly investing yourself in the work, for the sake of finding something out or pushing things in a way that interests you, you follow that creative urge wherever it goes.
And that journey you go on with it, is what is seen in the work.
The completion? Maybe you love it, maybe you don’t.
Maybe other people find it awe-inspiring, maybe they find it repulsive?
You’ve got to ask yourself - does it matter?
What if everything could be treated in the same way. What if parenting was art? Your career? Life as a whole?
What if each day is just opportunity to explore the process of being human, push into its edges without concern for how it turns out, because there is no fixed state or finished object.
The only finished object is your remains and your memory in others - both things that you’re not going to have any concern for at that point in time.
There’s nothing more normal than shaping your life around thoughts like: Am I doing this right? How can I make sure this turns out well for me? What will other people think?
But as normal as they are, the slightest prod reveals them to be ridiculous ways to operate.
There is no right, you are never in control and most people don’t care one bit about what you say, do or look like.
Ironically, shifting your attention into just being fully with the thing that you are doing - child-rearing, gardening, metal work, accountancy (maybe?) is the surest route to a satisfying existence.
And the only chance anyone has to live remotely original life.
By not trying to be original in the first place.
I could have endless conversations with you about so many of the ideas you bring up here! I look forward to listening to the interview with Pete.