[about] James Norris

 

I am driven by the desire to make art; in my methodology, art is the process of understanding within the ontological statements of Tikkun Olam; to heal, repair and transform the world.  My lived experience, my body, my human time is constantly (re)defined by the death of my mother. It is the inescapable void that now surrounds my experience/body/space/time. Her suicide echoes backwards and forwards: it re-writes everything. All of my work, irrespective of my intentions, is about my body living with her suicide and unpicking the complete devastating mess that was left behind and bounding forwards, backwards and every which way I now exist in.

 

My material is my mother; I continually use my art practice to explore and most importantly attempt to understand. The loss of my mother is not acceptable, not attainable as a rational ideal and not fixable, which is certainly why it is a life's goal - with each new piece of art there is a new hypothesis of how one might understand such a hungry and all-encompassing void. However, there is only ever the void, left bigger than before­­ - as quick as I make something it is swallowed and thus the task is beyond me, but the absolute necessity to continue making art to an endless goal somehow seems worthwhile. I need an infinite task to sustain me.

 

 

 

 

 

Making art/ understanding the world/ Practice-as-Research

 

In The Reflective Practitioner (1991) Schon refers to tacit knowledge as ‘knowledge-in-action’ – he also writes of ‘reflection-in-action’. One of the examples he gives is that of Jazz musicians improvising together, each of them able to make rapid-fire judgements and corrections on their playing. Here, they do not only present a tacit knowledge of how to do something, but further than that, they are able to improve how they do it in the micro-moments of action. This would suggest a level further than embodied knowledge into something virtuosic. Again, this reflection-in-action is not in words, but in the body – the fingers on the keyboard.  The mind and the body are working together in a way that is both praxis

and theory, both the body and the mind.

 

The research that I have undertaken was nearly entirely practical: the knowledge is gained by praxis – and so the results (evidence) are in practice. This makes the knowledge impossible to write about, one can only begin to speak of the entire world view that grows from the absolute methodology of practice of research.

 

For me, making art and living are one and the same thing. Amy and I have made a show together with the same methodology that has lead us to marriage; that changes the way we live together and the way in which we interact with other humans. This process, and by that I mean both in art and in life, is heuristic research.