Living in the Material World

Abstract

Abstract: This article is written from the perspective of a maker. It focuses on the maker’s reflections on and during making. The artist/author records her process during the making of Volum, a development project completed in 2011. Volum was an art project, and the focus in this paper is on the process of making; the experiments in various textiles and techniques; the agony of choosing and rejecting and the search for visual effects able to communicate the expressions aimed at. Additional material is included from a separate study of artists’ and designers’ processes undertaken in 1995. That study aimed at discovering how artists made use of their knowledge in a specific assignment, how their work evolved from the beginning to the finished products, and how they reflected on their processes. An examination of the author’s own artistic process, alongside those of participants from the previous study, revealed many similarities. That is, the ways in which we talk and think about making processes, and how we use and enhance our knowledge and experiences in action in the studio, are comparable. The aim of this reflective, praxis paper is to find ways of making some of our tacit knowledge explicit.