1. On Language and Shared Questions: We Share Words

We share words—they move between us. We all collectively participate in an agreement of language, a word–exchange that allows us to communicate with each other and ourselves through speech and writing. The consensus of language is an agreement that allows for the possibility of disagreement, a simple expression of the fact that speech is a ‘shared order’ of communication that allows the expression of ‘individual thought’. It is precisely this double condition that offers insight into the fundamental and inseparable relationship between language and ethics.nsofar as language acts not as means of communication but of invitation,it emerges both within us and between us.

2. The Studio as Site / Situation: On Spatial Imagination 

“I have often felt, while fighting in the middle of the night to keep drowning lungs afloat or to stanch a flow of blood, that the room about me was participating in the struggle, how more than once the walls gasped, then stood still at the instant of death”  —Dr Richard Selzer

The room that “participates in the struggle” speaks to space as a participant in our thoughts and actions, opening the possibility of a communicative exchange between our inner being and the spaces we inhabit. These exchanges need not only occur in struggles of mortal consequence or at the instant of one’s death. Our communicative exchanges with space may also speak in whispers, telling of our fragility, embodying with great nuance the material and spatial empathy of life. This fundamental exchange between us and the world is, of course, reciprocal—absorbing and projecting in both directions. As we build the room, the room builds us, as we construct spaces, they construct us; they fill us with their structure, their content, their character and spirit. Perhaps, then, space is the other half of us.

3. The Studio as Site / Situation: On Material Imagination 

 We cannot solely ask the questions that can be posed in words: we must aspire towards language, towards articulating and communicating our thoughts through words, but we mustn't limit what we ask to what we can speak: this would diminish the spectrum of our inquiry. Our horizon would be diminished, casting aside enormous territories of ‘ways of knowing’ that we have been developing for thousands and, in some cases, millions of years. Some of the most nuanced and complex questions simply do not fit within language; we feel them, we sense them, we experience a kind of pre-linguistic curiosity. The specific experiential situation within which we perceive and ask our questions has a profound impact on the development of new perceptions and understandings.

4. Towards Seeing, Not Showing

We make drawings not to ‘show’ but to ‘see’. This simple turn of phrase expresses an inversion: rather than starting with a pre-formed/pre-existing image or idea that we project upon the world, the act of drawing becomes a site of exploration and inquiry. This site extends to our studio that now too becomes a site of receptivity and listening. This receptivity allows our works to emerge within the atmosphere of our embodied situation, mingling our questions with the specific spatial and material imaginations of our making. This receptive exploration invites the world into our questions, transforming our perceptions and consequently our worldviews. Understanding emerges in direct conversation with the situations within which we ask our questions.

5. Listening as a Form of Imagination 

Authentic exploratory research begins with one’s curiosities. At times, these questions arrive as full-throated roars of radical urgency, while at other times they arise as gentle whispers. It is essential that all are heard; we never know where the sparks of a new vision will emerge. Creating an atmosphere of trust, where an individual’s interests are driving their research, is essential: people are transformed when they are listened to. Perhaps the single most important element in fostering an atmosphere of trust is listening.

6. Towards an ‘Of-ness’ and ‘Is-ness’ of Drawing 

There is a double condition to a drawing which poses an interesting question regarding the commingling relationship between representation and material. A drawing can be ‘of’ a horse, bear, house, or person, but it also always ‘is’ something. It has a material reality: it is paper or charcoal or paint. It is a body in space. Not unlike speech, or song, where language and breath commingle to create voice, a drawing’s Is–ness and Of–ness are inside of each other. Finding the resonance between the ‘of’ and the ‘is’ is essential in all our works and modes of expression. This is when they take on a voice, a tone that speaks to us and to others. This is where we can inhabit our questions and develop new ways of making that commingle our material imagination, poetic imagination, embodied knowledge, and voice.

7. Where Do We Know What We Know? Inhabiting Our Questions 

One could speak of playing the violin for years, could read every text related to the history of violins or even constructed a violin from scratch, and yet this wouldn’t result in being a proficient violinist. While each of these forms of knowledge contribute to one’s understanding of the violin, one cannot read one’s way to playing violin, because it is the elbow that must know it, the wrists, the ears, the lungs… We must embody the knowledge of playing the violin through the embodied experience of playing it. This presents  a classic epistemological question: How do we know what we know? But we could also ask: Where do we know what we know? Where is the knowledge of playing the violin? Or of painting, of drawing, of calculus or of chemistry? Where is the knowledge of football or skateboarding, of physics, or geometry? Where is the knowledge of speech?