Tutor Thoughts: Connection - Hayley Lock

Tutor Thoughts: Connection

By Hayley Lock

As Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and cosmologist famously said, we are ‘star stuff’ exploring the stars. Life is the information pathway by which the universe achieves consciousness and self – awareness and begins to explore itself, including evolving new modes of experience, creativity and beauty.

Reality can be seen as an aggregate of objects and phenomena that is linked through relations and connections. These objects and events are linked in an infinite chain joining everything that exists to a single whole where matter is often discrete and everything interacts with everything else. The principles within relation and connection presents systems that form as well as order, expressing the materiality of our reality which has its own motion within that matter.

Jane Bennett in her book titled Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things professes that everything is alive, interconnected and in process, stating that specific things are drawn to us and are alive through complex interrelationships and entanglements, stating that humans are neither sovereign or autonomous but instead composed of complex webs of active bodies and materials. All matter is alive and in process with other matter.

On the flip side, it is true that to function, humans appear to need some solitude or quiet time too, so how do we navigate reaching out as well as recoiling back into our personal space to make work that is meaningful, questioning, playful even? How can we make purposeful work that sits within the wider culture?

Turbulence is of course important, but how can we hold on?

The artist Hito Steryl suggested ‘Letters against Separation’ a project where writers from across the world documented the impact of Covid – 19 on their home, work, place and family life. Written through the portal of conversations.e-flux.com this kinship revealed the angst of society along with maintaining a dialogue across continents, to create a closer affinity with one another to assert solidarity within mutual connection as well as relation.

So, when invited to write this piece around the topic of connection it seemed fitting to touch on our connectiveness as human beings in these unprecedented times. To consider our place in it all and to ruminate perhaps around our own existence living in parallel or in sequence with this mutual yet foreign encounter, enforcing quarantine, isolation, distance, superstition, paranoia, fear as well as be moved by the invocation of professed heroes.

In the midst of the pandemic, and prior to the getting the invitation to write around the theme of Connection I was invited by Helen Rosemier, one of the founders of the OCA London student group to run a Keeping Up Momentum Zoom session to suggest strategies to keeping making work during lockdown. Aware of the separation and isolation that Covid – 19 brought with it, I proposed a workshop titled A little magic as a way to adjust and reflect on our current altered experiences through making work quickly and collaboratively.

I am absolutely delighted to show some of the range of work made across the two half day workshops and say a big well done to all of those who attended. This is a great reflection on how to work with found materials already at home, to circumnavigate personal circumstances and situations, to collaborate and of course mainly spend time working across multiple disciplines in an open and fluid way. You were all very supportive and generous in your connectedness and for me it was of course, a little magic….

Big thanks to all students present on the days and to Holly, Simon, Dhama, Karen, Kinga, Steve, Naomi and Jane (and many more unnamed collaborators) whose images are referenced in this writing.

https://oca.padlet.org/helen416376/ skhdk8dpeen4n13f