A busy week - but advice from the studio - involving the unconscious mind

I t has been a very busy week - but I thought I would briefly post some advice from fine art studio practice that might help with blogging.

A fine artist goes to the studio as a place to work, like a performance space it is a dedicated place for thinking and creating - trying out new things and then building those ideas into a more cohesive unit that you can then present or share with others.

One trick for studio artists in that space is to put up images on the walls to look at - one's own images or inspirational images - and when you go into that space to sit with these images for a while in order to put the mind and body in the place they need to be to 'think'. Sound familiar? It is a process to get 'in the zone' and to concentrate the mind in order that the unconscious mind can become involved. I have nicknamed this process as 'calling the muses' to help with the thinking. Often this involves a cup of tea or coffee to stimulate concentration but not always. You can be very alert or very tired, and that is when the muses come to help you to think and create.

While Tom and I were chatting last night, I found myself saying that this studio trick of getting in the zone might be a useful technique to try when blogging. We often come in from a busy work schedule and cannot 'think' about what to say in relation to the coursework. We are not 'there' for that because our mind is concentrating on other things - schedules - catching up with friends - emails for work - shopping - entertainment...

However, we could think about the time on the computer like going into the studio.  If you have a 'studio' session for blogging - you could allow yourself a bit of time to get into the zone before feeling the 'pressure' of creating something on your blog. So this would mean adding a step to your process. It would mean coming into the virtual space (web) and looking around, reading - looking at images - looking at some short audio-visual  - even audio (I have iTunes) when driving around the space. So it means treating this initial time like studio time when you are purposefully getting into the zone to involve the unconscious mind in the proceedings.

So if we consciously build this time to get into the zone into the process - but mindfully then focus back on producing things for the blogs (or journals or mood boards etc.) this might be the best of both worlds and produce some marvellous things that were not apparent in the first instance - so ways to capture our thinking using practice-based methods.

I am also thinking here of some recent coursework that Jodie - now in Module 1 - used as examples in her Areas of Learning where she showed short films of her performance rehearsals (up on YouTube permission asked to share link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amrSHVHS-Wk) that show the process of people working out ideas and choreography. So that preparation time - that rehearsal time - might be a way to think about the zone. I usually know when I have reached it - because I can tell I am concentrated - and ideas flow. Daisuke talked about this flow in his final inquiry. See his archived blog http://momngaxxx1.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2013-11-21T04:16:00%2B09:00&max-results=7

I once asked one of my art tutors the question that if we created something using the 'unconscious mind' would that still be considered a conscious creation? He said yes, so every since then I have felt the freedom to allow myself access to the unconscious for arts practice. I suppose here I am really passing that freedom onto you - but in a different time and place.