Conceptualizations

I am an experiential artist. Learning by doing underpins both my experimentation and my principle aim, the creation of an opportunity on behalf of the viewer, this artwork aimed to evoke their experiential learning. Creation and evocation are bridged by the paradoxical differential experiences that both emerge from the basic spiral of experiential learning: from concrete experience to reflective experience to conceptual experience to experimental experience. 

Every artwork which leaves the studio hopes to implicate the viewer’s imaginative instigation at the phase of reflection and conception. This watching/feeling/thinking includes modal engagements—such as projection, synthesis, personalization, reconception, meditation, autopoeisis, imagination, and any number of additional intentional or emergent ways of engaging the image and its field.

A second sense follows from the fundamental limitation: all bodies of my visual work in some way conceptualize and formulate iteration. Iteration means: repetition, and from repetition, pattern.

However, when I was nominated to be an artist in 2014-2016, the most developed of my creative practices was the design and facilitation of experiential learning tools. The roots of this go back to the eighties, and the flourishing of this practice was initiated by the formation of a partnership, squareONE:experiential toolmakers, with artist and educator (and shamaness!) Judith Buerkel in 1995. Tools designed by me were used in my later partnership with Kenneth Warren, in4tuity, 2014-2015. 

Then, in 2015, I fully turned away from consulting and music, and became an artist at 60 years of age.

Ten years later, I developed a tool Getting to Know, for a group exhibition of participatory art, curated by Susan Snipes and myself, Terms of Engagement. This tool asks people to answer one of three short surveys, have a an instant snapshot taken and attached to the survey, and have this production join an archive. 

Next, in 2026, the Quest Collaborative gave me a chance to build out and activate a prompt task-based experiential tool. This tool distributes random task prompts to anyone who wishes to do the task and in doing so put one foot into the ongoing Cleveland Art Game. The other foot goes in when the person adds their results to a public archive.

These developments over 30 years amuse me because my anti-straight path also describes a circle. The experiential learning cycle is the foundation of my improvement as a visual artist, yet, thrillingly, my much more developed and even superior practices predate my becoming a working artist, and those applied experiential learning tools orbit my core experiential learning commitments over 40 years.

I’ve come full circle, and now hop onto the next turn of the learning gyre. The next turn will spin off a lot of conceptual art now that I realize my olden toolmaking was, in fact, also an artistic practice.