• • Exercise 1: My PracticeReview your activities from projects 1 and 2, outlining the key points of your learning. How has focused on ideas of form and place impacted your practice?  How has this process related to your creative expectations and ideas? Has feedback been constructive and supportive? Begin a self-appraisal of your practice through mind-mapping and listing your methods and interests. Create a learning log entry that includes a presentation or mini portfolio with text, images, sound and/or video, documenting your creative practice to date.
• Contextual Point: Ryan Gander“I’m not really like an artist, I’m more like a conductor.”Ryan Gander.

Ryan Gander – The screenshot is taken from Ryan Gander – To Resist Closure.In this video, the conceptual artist Ryan Gander, who works with a vast range of materials and processes, talks about the importance of not repeating yourself, and how rules and restrictions encourage the creative process.
“The great potential of art is its ability to remain open, and to resist closure.”Ryan Gander.

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I’m like Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hide: I have a very creative thinking-in-the-box job, but I love following alternative rules about expressing myself. To be more precise, I design knitwear using knitting machines. To achieve that, I follow a path that is quite stereotypical. It has to comply with the rules and regulations of the knitting engineering practice. Engineering is a down-to-earth science. It has to do with action and reaction: when you apply old methods, the outcome is always the same. The way of thinking is uniform and straightforward.
Creativity is another (big) part of it. You have to use your experience and imagination to make ends meet, colours work together, to achieve a specific fit or even a look that matches the requirements given by the customer.
Since I started my OCA study, I realised that I’m unable to fit into a mould nor use the same way of thinking. I want to feel free to express myself and deal with my feelings. I work with my instinct. So, to deal with the brief to carry on with my studies, I sometimes have to push myself not to think how a knitting engineer would. I put some music on and scroll on the internet to find that instant spark: that seed would be planted into my brain and make it dream and think differently. It is tough to get into (what I call) creative Nirvana, but it is worth it! The results are rewarding and perpetual.
One thought can be with me for days or months, waiting to be born, logging in to find a voice. I sometimes get into a trance where time or place doesn’t matter. I find it hard to apply these ideas. It sometimes feels like my brain is going faster than my hands, like when I stutter trying to say many things at the time. The engineer kicks in and tries to put the ideas into boxes, the boxes onto piles; with the use of them, they are trying to create something, but I don’t let him! I believe that there is always something better to come into life.
OCA is giving me tools to shape up boxes to nest my thoughts. I don’t want the engineer to win. I want an artist to be born.

This is how I see my relationship with my studies. I’m flying in the air and they are pulling me down to put me into order, to make things that make sense. The photo was taken in Lincoln town on May the 6th 2023.

This photo was taken in Lincoln on May the 6th 2023

I need to build a bridge to make those two worlds meet and prosper. I need to explore disciplines and tools to unite all the heterogenous aspects of my character. Bridges unite, convey, and connect.

Studies help me navigate

show me paths, show me ways…

Enhance the details…

to see clouds,

and open space…

to see a puddle of heart on my drift

to see an old grey church in the mist,

To feel happy

to feel real,

connected with reality

more than I will ever be;

Look up,

and that is all I need.

And that is all I feel.

This is the reflection of me…

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It is hard for me to evaluate my work. I can only explain how it makes me feel. There is a lot of work still to be done, ladders to climb, and bridges to cross but I don’t care! This process rewards me with the pleasure of discovery: I know that my daily job doesn’t give me time to concentrate on my studies how I want to. I guess it is the balance I need to keep, the price I have to pay: the contact with my everyday life, with my problems and reality: but even though I know I have a lot to suffer, I have managed to be on The First Step.

The First Step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I’ve been writing for two years now
and I’ve composed only one idyll.
It’s my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step, I’m standing now
I’ll never climb any higher.”
Theocritus retorted: “Words like that
are improper, and blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it’s a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”

C.P. Cavafy

Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press.