“Our cravings for beauty are emotional, genetic in its drive to bring forth the carnal within. Releasing the animal, and letting the bird of desire sing.”
Paintings | Carl Barnett Design/Studio
The need to create and collect much like the need to consume food, satiates, its a personal pull to satisfy, a consumptive drive that sustains both body and mind. This harkens back to our days of cave dwellings and cave paintings, an instinct to create and to survive. Our cravings for beauty are emotional, genetic in its drive to bring forth the carnal within. Releasing the animal, and letting the bird of desire sing.
Ceramic Vessel | Kathryn Robinson-Millen
To collect and to create vacillates the landscape of the inner and outer self, easing the mind as we try to make sense of this world. The earliest examples of ceramics were spheres, a purity of form and making. I imagine this being a feeling of ease that tamed the anxious mind, as the night sky blinked, and the wind and animals howled. Creativity is basic in its instinct to express and to ease our ways of living, the ceramic bowl holds our food, while the vase holds the flowers that inspire. But the impact is not basic, it goes deep into our psyche, as we hold, move past and graze with our eyes. To collect speaks to the same emotion as creating, to posses another’s creative endeavor is to share their moment of personal rapture, flow and expression of a deeper inner dialogue. To collect someone’s creation is to then take part in an ancient conversation, one that words cannot fully express.
“To collect is to be an historian, preserving but also writing, adding to history as time moves on.”
Why one collects and creates is universal as it is personal, each of us have our own why, our own reasoning and desire. It’s genetic as it is emotional, tied to history and our immediate need for creative resolve and inspiration. Much of what we collect has its own pedigree, of who created and who owned, where it was made and when. An antique table can have an immense history, shown by its carvings and nicks, the hand applied stain that may have gone to black, or the hand writing marked in a drawer. Their is a history to every hand created item, a history of design influence and the hands that touched it. To collect is to be an historian, preserving but also writing, adding to history as time moves on.
The act of creating and collecting documents time, person and place, a biography as it is a geographic demarcation. Its an intuitive drive of expression, linked to others as it is to ourselves, to ease and inspire, paying homage to beauty and to life.