Material Culture Lecture notes:
As a race - Humans have the ability to poetically re evaluate perception through a state of almost neurotic and obsessive curiosity. Excavation occurs subconsciously before reconstruction - and so therefore there is never a 'construction' it is always a reflexive reconstruction of previous felt or read phenomena. Pure originality is a rare thing.
Beyond nesting and shelter building Humans create and materialise things as artefacts and objects - in response to our feelings. Rabbits don’t do this - Horses don’t do it - nor does the Whale - but Neanderthals did it – and we do it ... we manifest things beyond instincts and practicality - we create things for ourselves and others - in response to our emotions, imaginations and felt phenomenology.
We have a unique access as a race to a trail of historical artefacts of our shared lived materiality - A museum trail. A Hansel and Gretel trail of bread left only by the active, enabled and fortunate - so what of the evidence lost by the disadvantaged and defeated? - what of the lost voice ? It is said that history is written and re-written by only the survivors - the victors - so what of the lost ?
What if one day we may come to understand that the un-actioned or 'lost' threads of creative thought is still collectively active and within us somehow - and may still therefore have been recorded - and if so then can it be accessed. Where are these tales now - do we still hold them subliminally in deep memory. The Ancient Greeks and many other cultures thought so. Anamnesis. Poppy Cock ? Maybe not. DNA memory of generational trauma is now being evidenced so it opens up a new paradigm in terms of ancestral memory.
This is what has always interested me and fired the work I make - catching the unknown, the elusive - the in-between - the seeking out of the oneiric and speculative into a real material realm - into a poem or picture. It is viewed by some cynically as a shamanic approach - and yet for me it just seems a very natural and intuitive way of approaching things - and I think it is the case for many kinds of meaningful creative alignment - whether you write music or paint. You relinquish or give up the intellectual control in the shallows and go further out to sea – tread the deeper water, and risk what’s further out.
Discolysis
