On Documentation

Images: from my Graphic Harvesting in Everyday Environments sketchbook. 

A post about documentation has been brewing for a couple of days, this is a large element of my practice that I’ve wanted to clarify thoughts on for some time.

I use visual documentation (along with other methods) as a tool for practice and life. See some examples here. In my 1-1 Mindful Mapping sessions with people, the maps we make together are a document of their personal journey. Images I make for my own art and illustration often contain elements which have come from journalling or writing down dreams.

Other documentation tools I like to use are Julia Cameron’s morning pages, journalling,  blogging, Evernote, iPhoto, mood boards and tools from the Metadesigners Open Network.

When we document our experience, the creative process is expanded and we create reference points from which to navigate our journey. Documenting in the simplest of ways (keeping a diary, a photoblog, a sketchbook) can not only record our experience but help shape it.

In this blog post on MyUrbanist, Chuck Wolfe makes a great point about this. I would recommend reading the full post as it’s genius, but for some context Chuck makes the below comment in reaction to published skepticism about the validity of citizen fascination, compilation of urban decay or hidden infrastructure in comparison to ‘academic documentary efforts’. He writes:

“Rather than simply receive and review such messages (or debate their validity), why not document your own choice of how to live? Why not create your own urban diary?”

Documenting everyday experience (urban or otherwise), in the real world is something I find particularly satisfying, because it makes the mundane interesting and life exciting. In a workshop I facilitated in October called Graphic Harvesting in Everyday Environments we looked at how to use drawing not to make “good art” but as an observation tool to help participants become more present in their experience. This year I will run more of these workshops, and start turning them into a course.

Images from a walk though Chalk Farm, finding a little park I didn’t know existed. From going into documentation mode we discover new places and learn things (like the fact there’s a nice little food market in Chalk Farm on Sundays, or that Sylvia Plath lived there).   

Paradoxically, by letting go and seeing documentation as a tool for deeper awareness and focused direction (rather than “good art”), we can actually increase our artistic ability.

Michael Avatar, author of How To Be An Artist writes about how documentation relates to the artistic process through helping us see more:

“You are an information gatherer, you are an eye. Everything you see is interesting. Learn to believe in this and fashion your world towards the recording of that data [...] The more you go into this recording mode, the more you will see. So detail becomes important. The glistening lino floor of the underground carriage, the colour of the sky at particular times of day, the debris and the litter on the streets of your town. All is available and miraculously all is free. Take advantage.”

Later in the book he states:

“Art is everything that you see. Look through your eyes at the world and make a statement about what you observe”

So give it a go. Write one thing down you find interesting a day, draw your dreams, take a daily photo of something different on the same journey, start a blog about how you’d like to live. Make an installation of all the tiny green objects you can collect over a month, you could even go onto write a story about them. Document your world for the sake of expanding awareness and the results may just surprise you, or take you in a new direction.

This piece is cross-posted from September Sun.

Event next Monday: Graphic Harvesting in Kings X