SPARKLE
“The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.”
About the Research
Sparkle is the start of all of my research endeavors. As its mentee, Sparkle helps me practice attention, vitality, inquiry, and instigation. Sometimes, Sparkle is its own subject and other times, it leads me down tributaries into specific projects. Either way, it is ever-present: calibrating me and guiding my process.
Whether visual or otherwise sensed, Sparkle is an ecosystem’s intimate way of surprising. It delights, reorients, and energizes. It disrupts our default modes of perception, granting access to wonder and consequential states of humility, reverence, empathy, and engagement.
Sparkle is ubiquitous, undeniable, and exceptional. Dew, snow, darting insects, twinkles in colleagues’ eyes. I observe the posture I assume when perceiving Sparkle—a dexterous, playful state—and how attending to Sparkle infuses that posture with bewilderment and open reception. Sparkle shows up everywhere, refreshing my perspective, helping me navigate difficulties, and enchanting my days.
In the studio, I use Sparkle “data" collected in situ to guide gesture, speed, and color. I do not aim to illustrate Sparkle but to evoke it as energized, dynamic becoming. To do this, I embody the posture Sparkle trains me to enact: embracing surprise and vulnerability with wonder, agility, and levity. It’s a creative, contemplative practice, intuiting and honoring the infinitesimal moment of “being it.” The process educates me in how to feel, surf, and contribute Sparkle.
From visual expressions to interdisciplinary collaborations, talks, workshops, teaching, consulting, parenting, friending, being; Sparkle research is a progression of my life’s creative practice, teaching me how to receive a fleeting moment of intimate connection and transmit it into any and all of my endeavors.
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