The Maker’s Mind: a perfect circularity
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-05-24

Underpinning my own interdisciplinary practice and reiterated in my teaching, is the reassuringly recursive creative cycle. Approaching this subject from a pedagogic perspective, it becomes clear that the creative process encourages problem solving and fosters divergent ways of thinking. It can encourage the combination of materials through experimentation, the construction of new ways of seeing and of progressive material exploration. Learning about materials and processes are central and considered to be vital in developing an ability to manifest ideas, however a focus upon the purely technical or research alone, can lead to a diminished and inadequate view. As a maker and practice led researcher, I aim to foster a degree of control and familiarity with these core principles of making, however in addition I conceptualise, contextualise, develop designs and reflect both in and on my actions. I examine how this process might be applied when reinterpreting objects and fragments
from Prehistory. By focusing upon a site inhabited for over 5000 years, now the home of Cornwall’s combined universities, I borrow and abstract meaning from ancient fragments in order to create contemporary indicators. Using traditional and digital technologies, I reinterpret notions of ‘the domestic’ in archaeology.

Helen MARTON (Falmouth University)