Outer Sensing, Inner Seeing
The artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham believed that her perception of nature involved ‘outer sensing and inner seeing’. This is a way of observing the outside world that involves using all of the senses, assimilating the information in the mind, and then evoking a response using imaginative creativity.
For this exhibition, each of you has taken a walk in your environment and has sensed, selected, and documented what the writer Steven Feld described as your ‘tingling resonances and bodily reverberations’. In the brief, I asked that the response to your observations should express the essence of your experience and should involve a joyful and playful use of colour, texture, and materials. I encouraged you to use your imagination and creativity to develop something unique and extraordinary.
It is not easy to make new work from scratch – to observe and select, to document, to ruminate on ideas, and finally to let the imagination run wild to create something new and exciting. However, each work in this exhibition shows a wonderfully exciting and original response to your environment. Thank you for jumping feet first into Sensing Place, for embracing all it has to offer, and for creating such a wonderful exhibition.
Debbie
