Freedom and Association

The project Freedom and Association is a flexible, fluid, and personal investment in practice that loosens forms of language and opens up structures of value that cohere onto words and objects.
The non-fixed, process-based nature of the practical component of the research is extended in an understanding of post anarchism - as an ongoing, lived experience of the everyday and of friendship. I define anarchism as the rejection of dominant power structures and as pertaining to shifts in the formal and cultural values in creative writing and art. Post anarchism extends on this as an anarchism practiced in everyday interactions.
Social values signified in the ‘made’ and ‘bought’ are challenged through the practical component of the research, utilising scatter installations to question how an object’s financial value can subjectively shift. Formal and emotional relationships with materials are challenged through the use of discarded commercial goods and tools acquired from multiple sources, as well as the giving away, rather than selling, of artworks. In poetry the practical research also aims to loosen the values of words, liberating them from formal sentence structures in free associative messes, or extended graffiti. Does poetry in the context of my practice operate as art? Is graffiti poetry? Are scatter installations a poetry of objects?
The research engages post anarchism as a flexible way for living, rather than anarchy as a utopian political ideal. I explore post anarchism as a tactic for resistance, but also a tactic for creative freedom within art practice. Within contemporary art practice it is near impossible not to participate in neoliberalism, but harnessing various tactics to cope with or challenge structures of power can create at least some sense of freedom, as fleeting or momentary as it may be.