studio jan 19 weaving surface

For a while I forgot where the idea in these images was going... I worked on it a little more today and remembered something new. I imagine a surface woven and detailed.

Having recently focused my energies for the development of my art practice, I face the awesome question of what exactly is my practice? This has always been a rather complicated query for me, and never have I located an answer. Arjun Appadurai, a cultural studies academic who studies globalization, writes about the cultural reproduction of self or the enculturation of a family in his essay "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" from his book Modernity at Large (thanks to my M.Phil program for linking me to all these important writers). He says,

As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or as grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile, new commodity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and rumors and fantasies about the new settings are maneuvered into existing repertoires of knowledge and practice...

It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication. As a group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai, 1997, 43-44)

Because of this constant stress of what Appadurai calls 'consciously choosing', perhaps I have forgotten that one actually doesn't choose an art practice, it in some way happens to the artist. That is the only way art can ever truly just be, and remain present, unconscious of itself.

 I have a project brewing in my mind and will keep posting pictures as and when it gets along.