This is the work of the artist Kathy Herbert. This website has been divided in to CURRENT PROCESS and ARCHIVE and you can navigate the different areas using the menus above.
I am interested in the issue of how we live on Earth and and how art can articulate this relationship.
Some Inspiring ideas
Jill Bolte Taylor, Neuroanatomist and brain researcher, studied her own stroke as it happened! In this TED talk (link below) she describes how it felt to have only the right side of her brain functioning as the haemorrhage had happened in the left side. She said that everything was energy, that she was connected to everything in the universe through this energy. She described it “Nirvana”. I found this fascinating as it relates to my view of how art happens. When I am drawing, I am aware of this process – the information in my mind, my memories, flowing freely to my hand and onto the paper. I am aware of my imagination at work and of the synthesis of all of these elements. https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight
I have recently read The Planet in a Pebble. Zalasiewicz J. (2010) The Planet in a Pebble. A Journey into the Earth’s Deep History. Oxford University Press, New York. “In this book Zalasiewicz chooses a pebble of slate from a beach in Wales. He takes us on a journey through the history of that pebble – how its atoms were forged; how its molecules riseded in the rock of an ancient continent, and were eroded off and carried into the sea where they sat in the deeps capturing evidence of life; how they were lifted up within the mountains and then released by weathering once more to the Earth’s surface.” -From the book’s jacket.
Humility by Carl Sagan. https://youtu.be/o8GA2w-qrcg. In this YouTube video, Carl Sagan describes a “sermon by humility” when he exposes how humans have “not been given the lead” in the story of the universe. He talks about our earth’s smallness and insignificance in the great Cosmos.
“To search for the good and make it matter”. This is Estella Conwill Majozo’s introducing line.(Majozo, E.C. 1995. “To Search for the Good and Make it Matter”. In: Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art. Ed. Lacy, S. Seattle Washington: Bay Press. She goes on to say that it is not just transforming ideas into matter but to actually make those ideas matter. (my italics) Art has a job to do in society and I feel that I can better undertake that job if I am focused on more than my own opinions and sensitivities. I feel that art should belong in the everyday, it should be something we all meet as a matter of course regularly in our lives and that it should be a part of our experience of life.
J Beuys wanted everyone to be an artist, to use creative thinking in whatever profession or walk of life one held, and that it should be done co-operatively. He felt that this would result in what he called “Social Sculpture” where we all mould and shape our world. Bourriaud, in his essay Relational Aesthetics (2002, France. Les Presses de Réel) spoke of Relational Aesthetics as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interaction and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. My own concerns and way of working has developed and grown from these ideas, from feeling that I want to be a useful artist, that I want to make meaningful interactions with audience and to make my work matter.