دسته: تکنولوژی ساختمان

Reflections on my artist residency with the Berghof Foundation 2: How to begin?

My vision for this work is best described as bringing my art practice alongside conflict transformation in the belief that something positive can happen in that shared creative space.

I don’t claim to know what will happen or even how. My experience does convince me that opening up my painting practice offers opportunities for other people to feel energised and more vibrant. And that feels like something valuable to offer to people engaged in the vital, difficult work of conflict transformation and peace building, the people who do the field work and the people who produce resources for them.*

So there I was with these ideas offered to the Berghof Foundation and received with interest. How to proceed when the pandemic prevented me travelling?

Home studio

As an artist, paintings emerge out of my, almost daily, studio practice and are intrinsically connected to my lived experience: what I’m reflecting on, what I’m reading, who and what I’m seeing day by day. In my original vision, residency artwork would come out of taking that studio practice into dialogue with the new environment, responding creatively to the work of the organization through empathic engagement with its people, practices, and processes.

Instead I began this engagement online, watching interviews and documentaries on the website, attending a Zoom staff meeting where I introduced myself and the idea of the residency. To these ‘watchings’ I took along my sketchbook, capturing words and images that resonated for me, later adding colour as I reflected on what I’d heard and see. The tempo of a voice might prompt a line moving across the page. The emotion heard behind a related experience might prompt a colour.

I started a series of online ‘Studio Interludes’ with staff, inviting them to my studio to see what was in progress, talking about art and conflict transformation, and about other artists. (More on these in la later post.)

In the summer of my missed visit, BF sent me a copy of their 50th anniversary book that celebrates the work they have done since being founded in 1970. The carefully wrought texts and images in the book helped me immerse myself further in the work of the Foundation. And as I continued my studio practice at home in Scotland, I began to see how these very pages could be the beginning of residency artworks, as ‘found poems’.

Next time, the process of creating the found poems…

*It seems likely that art can be of benefit to conflicted parties during the processes of negotiating and building peace. I’m not yet in a position to claim that or to offer many strategies for doing it. I am collecting examples of such work.

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13/04/2025
Creating found poems — Lynne Cameron Artworks

Given a page, a poem is found by letting words jump out to meet the eyes.

Then moving up and down the page, adding words or omitting them to let a new text take shape.

A different text that echoes with the original. Forged from metaphors. Allowing the richness of multiple and implied meanings.

Isolating the words out of the page and attending to the shape of the found poem.

Adding form and colour to re-connect the words into the new whole.

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13/04/2025
Maintaining a creative practice — Lynne Cameron Artworks
- how the physical space of the studio makes a difference, what’s on the walls, the materials, my tables and easel
- my use of images, sketchbooks, photos
- how my practice is about the intangible too: commitment, values, intention, life choices
- how rituals and routines support making art
- the daily practice of journal writing, reading, intuitive painting, and time in the studio space
- how the practice is nourished with gallery visits, books, talks
- influences on my work of other painters and philosophers
After reflecting on their own work, we discussed aspects of the physical space in which conflict transformation happens, the meeting rooms people sit in, the food offered. Every aspect incorporates a message to participants and contributes to the conditions in which dialogue happens.

We talked about visualising ideas to simplify and to adjust thinking.

And arising as perhaps most important was the question of how time and space for creative, non-linear thinking might be incorporated in the pressurised processes of conflict transformation and peace-building.

I labelled this idea ‘the imaginal space’ and next time, I’ll share our deeper dive into what happens there.
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13/04/2025
Creative thinking in the Imaginal Space — Lynne Cameron Artworks

In the middle week of the residency we dived a little deeper into the idea of the imaginal space and what can happen there. Taking space literally, we held an in-person Studio Interlude and set up a table with materials for art-making in the canteen. But the term imaginal space is powerful as a metaphor to characterise creative thinking in project teams and by individuals.

The imaginal space is where

•       creative thinking happens

•       we catch whispers of possibility

•       unknowing is welcomed

•       opposites are held in creative tension

•       sparks fly

•       intuition speaks

•       we attend / listen / look

•       multiple ways forward reveal themselves and enter into creative tension with what is

If you were to watch me painting in the studio, you would see me in a physical space with resources that support my artwork. You would also notice that the work is marked by pauses and ponderings, periods of sitting and looking, of walking around the room, of doodling on scraps of paper and writing in notebooks. What’s going on in these times is all of the above – I take the painting in progress into my own imaginal space in order to find the next steps. These come out of letting new possibilities arise and holding them in creative tension with what is already on the canvas.

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13/04/2025
Painting and other arts — Lynne Cameron Artworks

It was interesting for me throughout my stay to hear about the creative activities of Berghof staff and how creativity inhabits people’s lives. I came with my painting practice and poetry; other people had experience in, and love for other art forms: theatre, photography, music. In our conversation, we talked about the performative arts and how they might offer ways of working with others to reframe situations and emotions.

Painting can be performative and collaborative, but is often a more private and silent activity. It is non-verbal, and there’s a power, I find, in losing oneself in colour, line and form. While busy with the material and mixing of paint with water, the body occupied with brushing and looking, the mind is quietened for a time and returns to some kind of equilibrium. From the time ‘lost in painting’, we can emerge invigorated and somehow more balanced. The activity is, in itself, restorative; the end result of the painting serves as a reminder of process and is not required to be more than that.

An edited summary of our conversation can be found here

https://berghof-foundation.org/news/transformation-through-art-talk-with-lynne-cameron

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13/04/2025
Deep Looking — Lynne Cameron Artworks

Several years ago, I gathered a set of questions to support people looking at paintings. The power of attention and noticing has been important in all my work, academic and art. Visual attention as a painter is different from the aural and analytic attention I needed in my research into spoken metaphor.

These questions are an introduction to attending to paintings, particularly abstract painting. I’ve recently developed new questions that go more deeply into the theoretical aspects of painting – I’ll share these soon. Meanwhile here are my initial deep looking questions. They’ve been trialled in several gallery / artist talks – viewers are invited to sit with a painting for at least 5 minutes and then to respond to the questions on paper, through writing or mark-making. I am always amazed by what people find..

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12/04/2025
Refound — Lynne Cameron Artworks

We found the leaves pressed between two pieces of kitchen roll inside a book that I left here in NZ in October 2020. I have no memory of their collecting, pressing, laying aside.

Refound, they are making new memories as she turns 6, as she creates and owns her artwork.

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12/04/2025
A deeper layer of questions — Lynne Cameron Artworks

I spent a long coffee break going through my turquoise notebook – that’s the one where I write notes about my reading. In my mind that day was how to think about some ‘self-portraits’ I’d been painting, how to tie them in to my practice. I re-read notes from poetry workshops to see what spoke to me now. Notes from zoom calls with my friend. Notes about ideas and notes to self. Sometimes screams of agony. Notes and connections. More of an on-going conversation than notes.

The notebook’s timespan included encounters with Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lectures , Jane Hirshfield workshop at Coffee House Poetry, Bracha Ettinger on matrixial theory, Griselda Pollock on Charlotte Salomon, Gabriel Josopovici on Modernism, and the Weird Studies podcast. Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil on attention, on ‘unselfing’, linger in the background always.

My conversation with the notebook turned itself into a list of questions. I realised as I listed them that these were the questions I needed to ask of the portraits.

I gave each portrait half a day to answer the questions. By writing in response to the paintings, I wanted to lead myself deeper into the labyrinth, to explore the mystery while retaining the mystery. Not to ‘unpack’ or explain – impossible – to notice more. The answers became a starting text, to be worked into something more poetic until it fitted, resonated, joined forces, with the painting.

I’m still working out how to best present these hybrid artworks, exhibition or book or … Meanwhile, here are the questions. Perhaps they would work for you? Or perhaps you could find your own set from your notebook?

Questioning a painting

What can be seen in the painting?

What happens with attention?

where is attention drawn on looking at the painting?

what was my attention drawn to when I was painting?

How does the painting gesture to beauty and goodness and tenderness? and to the shadow?

What’s being amplified?

Where’s the uncertainty?

What’s the weirdness?

What’s oscillating? What dynamics are in action?

Any collaborations going on? e.g. with ideas, with other painters

What has returned in a new way?

What transformation has occurred / is offered?

What possibilities are being held in creative tension?

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12/04/2025
Midnight Blue — Lynne Cameron Artworks

This contingent emergence of form and colour fascinates me. I prepare the surface, allow the conditions, then the ink does its thing. I can adjust the process to a limited degree by tilting, adding or subtracting water.

As I get to understand what a new material can do, a dialogue starts with earlier work as I think back to past paintings and processes for possible new ways to work. I wondered what would happen on a disrupted surface, and over handwriting. AT the top of this post is the outcome. I wrote out the opening words from and Iris Murdoch’s text (The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, 1967) on to thick watercolour paper, ripped them and glued them randomly to construct an almost 3d surface. Then I experimented with Midnight Blue ink spreading on this disrupted surface. This step draws on the word-collaging technique I developed 6 years ago in Berlin Notes in the Dark. That technique was used on a larger scale in the series Other People. In those paintings, pairs or groups of people engaged in unheard dialogue, their individual stance and the space between them conveying something of their relationship. You can see both series on this page by scrolling down.

The final step was reducing the insistence of the words with a layer of white paint on some sections..

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12/04/2025
Investigations continue

The work of self-knowledge and understanding is never done. It guides and informs everything.

This quote, from an academic paper on self, identity and the danger of narrative*, spoke to me – and with a recent painting that is called Interference, (acrylic on raw canvas, 60 x 80cm).

Other sources of insight currently include:

*Camila Orca, K., (2018) Opaque Selves: A Ricœurian Response to Galen Strawson’s Anti- Narrative Arguments, Études Ricœuriennes / Ricœur Studies, Vol 9, No 1 (2018,) pp. 70-89 . DOI 10.5195/errs.2018.387

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12/04/2025