Ideas to Encounter
Begin before idea
A piece usually begins because something catches the periphery of my attention. A feeling I remember, a fact that rattles around, a truth I can't quite name. They're like gritty grains of sand snagged in oysters, irritating until they grow.
Grit
Something catches.
I let it bother me for a while. I ruminate on it, turn it around, and begin seeding the page with symbols, references, shapes, and associations. I pile things onto the grit until relationships begin to form and an idea starts becoming visible.
Lather
Pile it on.
Eventually the accumulation begins organizing itself. An idea develops into a concept, a system, or a story. The work starts casting the shadow of what it might become.
Shadow
Idea takes form.
Then I challenge it. I reconsider the relationships, test what I've assumed, and sacrifice things that once seemed essential but no longer hold. Sometimes that changes a detail. Sometimes it sends the work several steps backward.
Simmer
Until it is what it is.
Sometimes completion arrives suddenly, ready to stand on its own. More often the piece needs to be pruned, sanded down, expanded, toughened up, clarified. At a point, more makes it less of itself. I'm grateful for "undo" at that moment.
Manifest
It becomes itself.
Throughout the process, I'm imagining the work in context: its scale, its surroundings, the people who might encounter it, and its place in a larger universe of thought. Eventually it is ready to become physical.
The image grows out of the screen and the mind into a tangible object. It becomes fixed enough to have a life beyond the process that made it, entering other spaces, relationships, and interpretations.
The image grows out of the screen and the mind into a tangible object. It becomes fixed enough to have a life beyond the process that made it, entering other spaces, relationships, and interpretations.
Each work becomes something to be encountered.
And someday will have been to make room for more.
Where it goes from here
What catches next.
RebelFor is an evolving practice, shaped by what catches, what becomes, and what comes next. Meet Bodee Render and the thinking behind the work, or begin a conversation about creating something of your own.
