At the Boundaries

james (uk)

Centering the Margins #1 and #2: These are based on the idea/theory of bell hooks about “centring the margins”. I was using this as an aspirational prompt for trying to shift my teaching. I literally cut the full margin of a piece of paper on all four sides and reassembled the margins in different folds and configurations in the centre. The point was to conjure new shapes that were wilder, looser, and different. bell hooks argues the centre has to make room / or move itself away from the margins. In my depictions, I imagine bell hooks would say, “the centre is still present.” go again.

CTM People and CTM Pink: It brings people into these centred margins and renders a 2D piece of parped and collage as a three-dimensional form.

At the boundaries

Hands maintain knots, The para-juggle, The paracross, The arms of paradox, At the boundaries: These were directed at thinking through an aspect of my ongoing sofa paper – the role of social & material in design education. 

Some of the paradoxes of the studio – teaching and not teaching, ambiguity and clarity, formal and informal, have appeared in my analysis. I found this wonderful and evocative quote: Creativity always demands work at the borders and in the void between the arms of the paradox” (Orr and Shreeve 2018 p.149 and I set out to explore this idea. I landed on this motif of these connected hands (the arms of the paradox) that I made from paper so they could be folded in a Mobius strip (a paradox made real). These hands maintain the studio as a site of paradoxes for example, where ambiguity and clarity can co-exist.