Jerwood Bank 2007

Because objects of art are expressive, they are a language. Rather they are many languages. For each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue.

 Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken to. The hearer is an indispensable partner. The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it.

There is the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to. The external object, the product of art, is the connecting link between artist and audience. Even when the artist works in solitude all three terms are present. The work is there in progress, and the artist has to become vicariously the receiving audience. He can speak only as his work appeals to him as one spoken to through what he perceives. He observes and understands as a third person might note and interpret. Matisse is reported to have said: “When a painting is finished, it is like a new-born child. The artist himself must have time for understanding it.” It must be lived with as a child is lived with, if we are to grasp the meaning of his being.

by John Dewey

 I thought of sharing these words with you. I felt they are relevant in so many ways to what we have been talking about: language, creative process, solitary practice and much more…

Duration: 12 minutes

Audio clip of Susan Hitch talking about language: invention and innovation; Alfred the Great and St Thomas of India.

Duration: 4 minutes

Duration: 3 minutes

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.
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On Thursday we had a visit from the actress Harriet Walker who shared some thoughts with us about her practice, and started, among other discussions, some interesting speculations on the differences between actors and dancers.

One thing she said in particular was particularly fascinating to me, that at times when she thought she had successfully and fully embodied a character role she felt that she had entirely escaped herself. She even said of her experience playing the character on stage ‘it was not me’.

For me this is an entirely opposite to my practice, which is perhaps something that I had not fully realised until now. Looking back I realise that I have always tried to be myself, or at least keep an element of myself in the work that I have done, both in the studio and on stage.
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The search for the necessary or distilled fragments of movement rarely come to us quickly. The search is often a meandering or even disjointed path, and often we are clear about what is not right before finding the thing that is particular. It is a constant cycle of building and editing.