Thanks Steve

For getting us back to the blog.
I do value this space, just been sitting in St Thomas's hospital for 2 weeks, with my father in law, he died last Tuesday.
BUT I have also done some thinking about this project
Thought 1 I shared with Kate which is this:
1. As artists you focus on the thing itself, the object, Kate looks at traces of sheep on grass, Steve looks at worn objects then makes replicas.
This is a sort of phenomenological (ie the thing like aspect of objects) approach, one that looks without the academic 'gaze' but a different kind of gaze.
Focus on sensory nature of objects.
This is why I have steered Kate in the direction of functionalism and away from symbolism and Implicit Meanings - the Mary Douglas take on life.
Sarah Pink writes about this in her book on the sensory home when she talks about sensory ethnography and accessing insider views of the objects.
You two are insiders on your own objects.
here is a response to Steve's point just now:
2. I like the focus on practices, and think you both reside in the realm of practice. This is like Bourdieu's notion of a set of dispositions that guide the way you do things.
this is called the habitus.
Steve is focused on worn objects, the use over time.
Kate is obsessed with intergenenerational objects, with the way they are used on the farm, over genersations.
This is very Kabyle house - here is a quote from Bourdieu:
Whether in verbal products such as poverbs, sayings, gnomic poems, songs or riddles or in objects such as tools, the house or the village, or in practices such as games, contexts of honour, gift exchange or rites, the material that the Kabyle House child ahs to learn is the produce of the systematic applciaiton of a small number of principles conherent in practice (Bourdieu 1990:74)