WORK AGAINST IMPULSE
Working against impulse or inclination can generate new ways of operating, unexpected possibilities of being and behaving. Capabilities are not fixed except through expectation. Stretch one’s capacity to flex and expand. Consider the practice of tempering — to modify or import the qualities of resilience and elasticity through heating and cooling, through the mix and mingling of materials. Becoming more conducive. Add levity for aeration, to avoid becoming too dense. Lighten up. Take one’s practice seriously but not too much one’s own self. Temper — to strengthen through experience, toughen, yet also to soften, to downplay, tone down. To restrain within due limits, restraint as liberation not as limitation. Limit as desirable leverage, the enabling conditions within which to work. Working with resistance — intuit when to yield, when to assert or interrupt. Between spontaneity and receptivity, between push/pull. Striking the right balances and alliances, reaching constructive compromises. Com-promise — the making of a mutual promise, of promising with. Here, to compromise does not mean to back down, to become resigned, but rather it is the act of a shared commitment — together, the taking of a common vow. Grappling — to come to terms with a material’s resistance. Objects might appear to exert a will and direction of their own. The extant power of every object can be exercised or exorcised, it can be let loose or left to languish. Navigating difficulty, the productive struggle of forces when figuring something out, working it through. Material correspondences, where a pledge is made between maker and material, not to strive to master but rather to work with.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)