The Bench, Mary Ruefle

Collette shared Mary Ruefle ‘s writing ‘The bench’ into our conversations. This gave weight to the imaginary , the envisioned, as a valid and essential part of experience and I felt this helped me to frame our discussions around support as potent in its capture of shared histories and narratives and aspirations.

“….I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench…… The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve.  After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it, so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench, the greater the expanse of that plank, the more it matched its true function, which was imaginary……….  I said that having no bench at all ……served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench.”

This understanding of the validity of the imagined supports the curious. Curiosity is a prime driver in Creative Practice. It moves thinking through making and the understanding that deepens within this process.

The artist’s true function is to imagine – in order to do this well they require to remain agile in their thinking. Time to imagine is of the utmost importance. Most recently in thinking about what gets in the way of creative thinking I thought about my domestic life as dark matter. It is the invisible day to day stuff of bringing up a family, fulfilling caring responsiblites, earning a living from paid work that have this pull on how career pathways divert in seemingly random directions.

Artist support is a safe place to make visible these unseen pulls and to help navigate through them.