Alex Murdoch, Artist

Tag: improvisation

  • Shaped or found?

    First tutorial with Jonathan, a totally brilliant and surprising and far-reaching conversation.  Trying here to get it all down but actually it’s going to be more like a list I think, of chapters to dip into as I go along.  

    I guess the main headline is what has my path been before, is it going to beautifully joined up (as I’ve been thinking) or is it going to be healthily separated.  What do I want out of this practice?  What can I take with me and what can I leave behind.  

    Why have I chosen clay now, or rather as I see it sometimes clay has chosen me?  I know there is something about my theatre practice being about liveness, physicality, spontaneity and movement – and there being something about clay being the opposite of that – a material that when fired transforms into ceramic material that is fixed in time for thousands of years.  

    Something about holding onto something?  About anchors?  About trying to bring something to stillness?

    All of my practice so far has been collaborative.  It has been ‘we’.  That the ideas of the collective can – or must? – be more rich than the individual.  But is that true?  Is that still true for me?  Where am I in that?

    It has just popped into my head that a text-driven theatre director associated with Battersea Arts Centre many years ago called devised practice ‘fuzzy compromised theatre born out of antagonism’.

    This still makes me laugh.

    We laugh when we recognise something painful and true.

    Anyway.

    Clay.  Clay is also a tricksy collaborator – it’s needy, unpredictable, it actually remembers wrong decisions you’ve made and changed and it throws those bad decisions back at you when you open the kiln door.  And it is also compelling, essential, honest, solid, real.

    We talk about being comfortable with process.  I notice when thinking about what I want to make I am looking for a finished idea.  I visualise a kind of finished thing.  But there is something here to borrow from theatre practice – a phrase we use ‘don’t jump through the steps’ – when actors don’t see all the steps or beats in the story or moment.  

    How can I bring that sense of movement to my practice, rather than go straight to end product.  Of course improv has lessons for me here.  This translates to what processes I am using in the studio – the mesmerising pull of the wheel versus the time it takes to master the wheel.  Perhaps hand building might offer me more freedom right now?  Collaborating and ‘yes and…’ing with the clay itself.

    Also we discussed the kind of things I feel blocked by – work I like and don’t like – what does it feel like when my practice is going well.  

    There is something about essence.  About kind of finding the seam, moving between different ideas and thoughts towards something particular and tiny that feels true.  You know true when you see it.  I remember bursting into tears when I saw an Edward Hopper painting in the Smithsonian Washington DC, from some distance away.  Tracey Emin’s scratchy nudes.  You feel something at a guttural level.  Maybe I just need to dial back and notice what does speak to my gut, and what doesn’t.

    Essence.  I don’t love all the work I make but I do love the placement of a leg on one of my three legged triped pots.  

    We decide it might be useful just to focus on that. 

  • You did it wrong.

    I love everything about this picture that I found on stupid social media.  Is the kid wrong?  I think the answer ‘I am dog’ is somehow more right than ‘I am Fifteen’.  Pedagogically the test has created so many crappy misleading clues for the kid – grammatically (’Guess who I am’), visually (a talking dog is actually a number, stoopid) before we even get started on the dated assumption that all kids learn through words alone and that some will be neurodivergent thinkers etc.  But most importantly the teacher is really firm in their opinion that this kid’s answer is a big red-cross WRONG.

    We talked in the last session about failure.  I’ve come to expect my assumptions to be up-ended in this class which is why I’m loving it.  Jonathan presented the idea – ‘do we really learn from failure?’ – and that what happens in the case of being told we’ve failed is more like fight (‘stupid test) or flight (I’m never going there again).  The educational system is designed to have us want to get things ‘right’.

    I notice to myself that all my life I’ve been trying to do things right, to not be as weird as I imagine people think I am, to achieve in other’s people’s eyes.  In the case of my career – to be picked.

    I have more to say on this.  I have a fleeting idea of making a piece of work about it called ‘Well done Alex’ based on an patronising interaction with a ‘more successful’ peer of mine.  I’ll come back to this…

    But actually there are lessons from my theatre training on the subject of working with failure.  We discussed Keith Johnstone (quoted in my first post), improvisation’s UK forefather and saying yes to the unknown.  One of the tenets of improv is to fail gracefully – mistakes are actually a gift.  (My company used to improvise whole stories in one night and on one occasion I had forgotten the name of my character’s husband – a perennial improv problem.  I dropped John in for good measure, accidentally naming Brian’s character’s husband.  Bri said ‘do you mean my John?’ – and thus we had a story of a revealed love affair.).  As Jonathan pointed out – we over-accept the offer from failure and run with it.

    In clowning training the moment of the failure or ‘flop’ is the moment where we discover real fragility and truthfulness.  More another time.

    Jonathan tried an experiment where we reframe failure by distancing ourselves in writing about it in the third person.  I won’t write it all out here but to sum up. In reframing her failure to manage her time in the ceramic studio, Alex discovers that she could be kinder to herself about her excitement to try too many new things, and actually that time is in fact a huge part of the narrative of clay as a medium.  As is slowness, stillness and most definitely unpredictable results and letting go.

    Quoting Jonathan (or somebody else) – 

    the information in failure is a public good, when it is shared society benefits

    Provocation this week – do something in your art practice that might not work.

    Take a risk.  Record it.

    Disrupt something, break it open.

  • How to begin

    Beginning of my MA Fine Art : Digital at Central Saint Martins. First session.

    Kindness, compassion as ‘psychological safety’ – exploring the idea that these might be the foundations of an art practice as opposed to the idea of progression only coming through the pushy dynamic of ‘challenge’ in a more hard, aggressive way.  I’m really excited by this.  I’ll sign up right away please for psychological safety.  I come from a freelance theatre background, and whilst lip service might be played to ‘safety’ by salaried policy-makers, for the most part one is dealing with rejection and criticism on an almost daily basis – it’s part of the deal.  You have literally signed up as an actor to put your self out there and have your self pulled apart, judged and given the ‘yes’ or ‘no’.  Maybe the visual art world is no different but I’m excited by Jonathan’s choice to put upfront values of compassion and kindness.

    I’m also an improvisor, where saying ‘yes’ opens the portal to creativity.  I have two copies of Keith Johnstone’s 1981 book ‘Impro’.  Underlined in each is the line – 

    ‘There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’.  Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain’.

    Through my improvisation practice I’ve experienced, hundreds of times, the adventure.  Also the ‘no’ sayers, and the safety dulling and literally blocking the work.  Saying ‘yes’ – to everything – became a foundational idea.  But it is not 1981 and this beautiful, complicated quote contains a lot to be unpacked now – questions about consent, ideas of safety having a value. 

    What does now feel like for me?  The geopolitical world feels like a bin fire.  Closer to home my theatre making practice feels vulnerable-making – and sometimes not in a good way.

    I don’t have any answers here.  This is just the beginning.  This is just asking some questions.  Getting down some notes.

    I don’t know yet what I’m going to put out in the world.  What I’m going to bring with me on the journey.  I do know that I’m going to take (from my theatre practice, from improv) the notion of play.

    Just playing.

    Seriously.  Just playing seriously and just playing for plays sake.

    In the session Olga said a lovely thing about the loss of innocence and play which I roughly remember as ‘when we are adults something is always for something’.

    Art-making is possibly the most vulnerable-making thing.   A community of practice with guiding principles of kindness and compassion held lightly around the edges seems like a fine idea – not to close off challenge but to enable it.  

    As Jonathan said instead of a scarcity mindset we’ll be ‘mindful, hungry, generous…the more we put in, the more there IS’

    (image : photograph taken from the library of Central Saint Martin’s students dancing in the Street, 06/10/2025)