Art Embodying Imagination

Art – applying skills to make visible
Embodying – bodily life as we experience it through various senses
Imagination – awareness of often autonomous, fluid, elemental stimuli

Art can be an experience of the realisation of elements in outer and/or inner worlds. It may be a discipline to train an awareness to those qualities, to cultivate and listen more deeply to known senses, memories or connections in the natural world. Perhaps also to listen for Time and also to invite liminal senses and spaces.

The imagination is in all these realms. The entire body is the place where all the material is experienced. And expressed. Not all of this is just personal and collective.

When regarding a physical image/object we want instinctively to feel the material surface to see how it’s been constructed, fashioned and finished. These reflexive responses are primary and felt in the body. How the components of content and style are transferred to the material is also sensed. These actions could’ve been built up over time on a canvas in layers, like the formation and deformation of land on this earth. An image or object is composed, composite.

The practises of Embodied Imagination while working with seemingly immaterial images, will use many of the same processes as the artist. The methods involve preparation of the grounds, engagement of the material without prejudice and generous reflection.

Sometimes the image coming to being will be physically incarnate sometimes not, depending on the nature, tradition and environment of the work. Examples of many such individual and group investigation, even ceremony, can be seen across time in most cultures. It can sometimes be useful to transition between the states, for example to construct a material object from an immaterial vision and vice versa.

The imagination can be such a strong clean tool in the hands of a well balanced body. Ah, that’s to dream for!

Peter Cameron