Revealing and Revelling in the Process

After an absence of a few days the Summer Academy blog returns with a few summaries of what’s been going on here in Salzburg.

On Monday Lin Cheung, a jewellery artist from England, discussed her work and her interest in the process of creativity and production. All too often jewellery is seen - and perceived - as a finished product. There is a traditional reluctance amongst artists to explain processes, fearing that to do so will remove the mystique which surrounds a “work” of art.

Instead, Lin wants to focus on the possibilities of a work, the potentials which lie in the uncompleted. In this way she is removing the focus on finality: she doesn’t want to realise the end product to soon, as this not only may stifle creativity, but also overlooks the importance of the process itself. In effect, she wants to “skirt around the idea of jewellery”

She talked about various projects in order to highlight process, encouraging people to consider both process and unfinished object, and thus prompt very different ideas of what the finished product will - or could - be. In previous exhibitions Lin invited viewers to write what they thought the objects were, investigating the idea that the objects, although made, are not yet defined. This interactivity involves the viewer in the process, raising the question of the relationship between object and viewer. In all art, viewers play an interpretive role, but the conventional set up of the exhibition all too often obscures the viewer’s relationship with the object, establishing a barrier between them. However, by focusing on process and on the unfinished object, we are empowering the viewer and allowing a much wider definition of what constitutes “art”.