20 Questions

19 Questions I ask of my work:

  1. Is this the right time to ask questions?
  2. Where is my instinct in this process?
  3. How does it feel when I am working on this?
  4. What are the rules/logic/frame of this work? Why?
  5. How will the audience know about the rules/frame – is it necessary?
  6. What is happening? How to capture, frame, condense it?
  7. What are the limitations – can they be materials?
  8. What are the stupid questions?
  9. Can I describe what I’m doing in a sentence?
  10. What is this? (medium)
  11. How can this be simpler? What is the least I can do to realize this idea?(editing)
  12. Who do I need to work with, where are they, how do I reach them?
  13. Who is it for? Where are they? How will they see it?
  14. Is this the right scale?
  15. Am I open or closed? Do I need to be open or closed at this moment?
  16. Who will see this? How will I tell the story of what happened?(documentation)
  17. How would I tell my grandma about this?
  18. What is the space between myself (or us) as the artists and the audience orparticipants? Is this the right space?
  19. Is it done? What else? What next?

7 Questions I do not ask of my work

  1. Who has done this before?
  2. Why am I doing this?*
  3. What does this mean?*
  4. How does this help?
  5. What kind of work is this?
  6. Who cares?
  7. What will this change?

* these are ongoing processes of observation and reflection, rather than questions I’d use to interrogate an idea, or work at an early stage

For more info on Lenka’s work, click here.

Lenka Clayton is a British-American conceptual artist and educator based in Pittsburgh. Her work contemplates, exaggerates and defamiliarizes accepted rules and practices of everyday life, extending the ordinary to the poetic and absurd.

The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a publication dedicated to supporting, documenting and contextualising social forms of art and its related fields and disciplines. Each issue of the Journal takes an eclectic look at the ways in which artists are engaging with communities, institutions and the public. The Journal supports and discusses projects that offer critique, commentary and context for a field that is active and expanding.

Created within the Portland State University Art & Social Practice Masters In Fine Arts. Program, SoFA Journal is now fully online.

Conversations on Everything is an expanding collection of interviews produced as part of SoFA Journal. Through the potent format of casual interviews as artistic research, insight is harvested from artists, curators, people of other fields and everyday humans. These conversations study social forms of art as a field that lives between and within both art and life.

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PO Box 751
Portland, OR 97207
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