Ian Parkin
I stated in my original learner agreement proposal that I wanted to look beyond the superficial nature of 'the bigger picture'. I wanted to drift, to unshackle myself from the responsibilities of work and home, places that have their own insistent agenda's, that bend and warp reality and time in order that we fulfil their particular procedures. I needed to use the time that the MA allowed me to develop work that would speak of how I was being affected by these environment's and how little time was allowed for reflecting on the thing's around me, moment's that seemed more and more like they were being erased, my head full of bare essentials. The time for watching a tree blowing around in the wind was now afforded me, it sounds silly but the simplicity of such a thing had become veiled, the time to actually look at it, study it, film it without somehow feeling guilty. Guilty that I was wasting my time, other peoples time, the world's time, the universe's time, time's time. I had now been given space to look at and experience my surrounding's with impunity. "Impulsions are the beginnings of complete experience because they proceed from need; from a hunger and demand that belongs to the organism as a whole and that can be supplied only by instituting definite relations (active relations, interactions) with the environment. The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto; that must, that is, be taken possession of if life is to continue." (John Dewey - Art As Experience. p61).
