Eudaimonia

(Greek: εὐδαιμονία [eu̯dai̯moníaː]),

Care oneself/understanding of one’s self. 

Oneself

A study of oneself amplifies this eudaimonia, a sense of life lived well, a flourishing, a feeling of participation in the flowing onward of existence, a connection with the caring entanglements of human (and other-than-human lives). Only with this primary attention to oneself can we engage with care in others & with the community. 

Others

Simply - specifically - attention to one’s art practice encourages attention to the art of others: encourages a participatory inclusive journey. 

Materials

In a series of collaborative workshops I organised with people with lived experience of homelessness, we studied how the processes involved in learning to make paint and paper impacted the art process. (In some ways we were looking at taking ‘care’ of one's materials.) Did this respect/understanding impact upon our usual ways of working?

We found that these processes encouraged not just empathetic collaboration, but gentle ways of experimenting. During my reflection I felt they also encouraged critical engagement with other vibrant materials: to ecology; earth materials; myth; wilding; and to other ontologies of being. This drew me to the later part of the term eudaimonia: daemon... benign, beyond-human, mythical beings. I believe this almost anthropological attention to materials enables a diffusion of knowledge, takes us beyond the object & enables us to engage with the hidden/liminal/marginalsed.

The process of investigating the beginnings of materials also encouraged me to look even further back in the process: to explore the creative urge, the Promethean spark... These researches have become new ways for me to record, to learn, to teach, to create, and, within the heightened site of lockdown, to watch them combine with the earning/feeding/parenting/sourdough starter quotidian...