What are we doing? Man eats grass....
What do we do?
We feel a continuous challenge to present what we are up to in words that are easy to understand, to help people to understand our philosophy and approach. Sometimes this is our failing – we forget to articulate ourselves, we are not clear, even that we are a bit confused ourselves (we give ourselves permission to admit this!). At other times it can feel to us that when people say ‘we don’t get you’ it can be because we are not doing what they think we should be doing ie ‘doing art’. This can be because we don’t seem to be talking about arts at all, when the viewer thinks that we should only ever talk about art, art should be the ONLY thing that we should be talking about, after all we are called Eden ARTS.
The simple version is this:
We want to try to make a difference, to help to make our world a better place, and the expertise we can bring to this desire to make things better is that we are creatives, art people, artists, people who are comfortable with disruptive and ‘other’ thinking.
We don’t think that art should only live in galleries and theatres, we think that art and creative thinking should be everywhere.
Artists and artistry and artfulness is a vital and necessary resource that can help to break apart the restricting practices of our institutional and bureaucratically dominated world. Artists and artistry and artfulness can do things like bring communities together, suggest ‘out of the box’ solutions to intractable problems, create positivity where negativity has become endemic, shine lights into darkness.
Do we do art? we do. Do we create platforms for artists? Totally. Do we advocate for the arts and creativity? Every day. We do these things because we utterly believe that without art and artistry and artfulness the world is destined to be dominated by systems and systematic solutions that lack the creative genius that allow us the way through the side door to a better way of doing things.
It is about how we artists see things and give ourselves permission to do so….
“QED. If I saw a man eating grass I’d say he was hungry. They’d have him certified.” Peter Barnes, The Ruling Class, 1968.
It is all about how you see things.
#adrian
