The recent research I have done has revealed that talking about objects we love, shared within a small group of people in a safe environment, can be life-changing (at its best) and very enjoyable (at its least).
It is a great way to develop storytelling techniques and to express our feelings and intellectual approach to understanding the objects we encounter in life. Most particularly, for my own practice in the arts sector, it is a way of talking about things, including art, in a new way.
Sometimes it’s hard to explain to another person why we keep something close to us forever. Sometimes it’s equally difficult to understand why we fall in love with a painting, or feel engaged by an artwork that we don’t think we even understand. Some art shuts us out in some way – we can’t even find an opening to approach it. It leaves us cold. We walk away without trying to understand it.
How can we develop tools that can help us to pursue the curiosity that art so often stimulates?
How can we see things differently?
As an adult education tutor many years ago my greatest achievement was to know that some people felt I had helped them ‘to see the world differently’.
It still makes me smile to type that.
The Story of Objects can help to do that too.
Carolyn Black 