Laura Donkers
Tel: 01876 580333
Email: laura.donkers.art@googlemail.com
Being outside, inhabiting the unfamiliar space, provides the circumstances to perceive the terrain, choosing a position from where it can be read and a language to describe it can be formed. Drawing brings into play intuitive processes that enable understanding to develop using abilities already possessed by the body to comprehend surfaces. This knowledge subsequently informs filmic decisions. The ensuing film envelopes the action led process.
My work centres on the belief that consciousness is the faculty of our whole body. In our increasingly encoded, intellectually based lives I want to explore embodied cognition and show how ‘thinking through the body’ can expand our abilities to perceive and imagine. If our bodies are earthed they will naturally respond to the messages, meanings and signs that flow over it and into it, acknowledging that reality is found in the solidity and dirt of the earth.
This approach explores how knowledge is gained through action. Action-led study aspires to balance practice and the physicality of life alongside theory, finding the connections that weave it into understanding.
Looking closely, following form, texture: tracing processes. Importance lies in the details. By placing oneself within the phenomenon one can fully come to see and know it. Thinking alone cannot lead to knowing because the mind can assume the creation of whole worlds through ideas and theories but these can never be a substitute for action and the subsequent securing of knowledge that occurs through physical encounter.
Perception is accomplished through awareness of presence – sensing for oneself firsthand the things that grow into knowing. This knowledge becomes a personal truth, which, like a pathway that closes up behind, becomes the basis upon which new learning builds. We begin with what we know, but to proceed further we must allow our instincts to corrupt well trodden thought-paths by taking a blind step forward, then, immersed once more in the unknown, we will discover something new.