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When we practice, we practice in spaces, most commonly described as "rooms". The rooms we inhabit come to describe our ways of practice. Equally, through their inherent limits, the rooms we work in come to define our ways of working. Large dreams may well be dreamed in small spaces, but, in small spaces, large sculptures can only be modelled, and constructed as fragments. In an effort to redescribe these limitations and to explore the possibilities of practice, we give special names to rooms. Kitchens are where we cook - from the popular Latin, cucina to cook. This embedded meaning makes sense except that the connection is not immediate and obvious to those untutored in Latin. The lack of obvious reference adds the possibility of radical obscurity. Do all words mean something else, or do some words just mean themselves? And, which ones are which? In its lack of an obvious semantic reference, the word "kitchen" becomes translucent. Through this process of passive disguise, the everyday kitchen acquires a nominal mystique: it is a kitchen not simply a room for cooking. The Bauhaus, mythological in its importance, sounds much less auspicious when renamed "the making house". The same is true when we exchange the semi-magic term "studio" for its companion term "study". A study is a place where intellectual contemplation takes place; a studio is a place where artistic making takes place. One room is for theory and abstract matters, the other is for practice and sensory matters. We enter each space already disposed to construct things or contemplate ideas and yet in each room we are making. By attending to how we name our working spaces we are able to shift attention from expected purposes towards the possibility of new ways and understandings of practising. By colliding studio with study we can arrive at a composite making place: Studio Theoria. Here we may see ourselves work as we work. |
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