I am interested in the percieved divide that is becoming prevalant that the arts and science are somehow divided and that 'Science' has a superior form of methodological approach and that the 'Arts' are in someway a lesser discipline. I do not see them as seperate disciplines just different parts of human exploration each complimenting the other.
I can say that without the arts and abstraction into communication we would have neither forms of humman representation and would be imprisoned in our own minds with no means of keeping information outside ourselves or any means of sharing it.
Whilst the language of mathematics is a synthetic truth and a language that attempts to describe the world it is the arts that help us discover who we are as individuals and our relationships with others. It is the use of the arts and science by us that create our cultures and enable us to respond to our different contexts. There is as much creative exploration in each discipline as the other as much fact and fiction and imagination in either and in both.
I do not enjoy living with the notion of the unknown it does not feel comfortable but I am releived that it remains larger than what we think we know. I embrace the thought of the unknown and live with it and work with it, the unknown shapes my practice. My practice is my living educational theory and as I live my life my practice is shaped. It may be 34 years of pragmatism in socially engaged arts will require me to rethink, reflect and move on but then is that not what we do as in art so in life?
I have attached an abstract that has been accepted for inclusion into 'Practice makes perfect' conference at Swansea Metropolitan University http://www.smu.ac.uk/practicemakesperfect/
Andrew Henon
|