Why Make? Episode 80: Forensic Art with Joyce Lin

Right.

But you'd take a brief, like make a table, and you would say, how can I invert that brief to meet my own needs and make anything but a table?

Yeah.

Essentially, something like that.

Right.

And your instructors would probably meet that with open arms or

laugh.

The professors, they gave appropriate pushback because they're Priority were to make sure that we learn the skills.

So, you know, being an instructor now, I completely understand where they're coming from.

You know, you can't let a student's ideas go too far ahead of their skill levels.

I understand having a firm background in the skills gives you a freedom to sort of experiment.

I also think the opposite is also true because I think you should never design or build or create from what you know.

You should always build from what you don't know.

I think I had to figure this out for myself first.

And now I somewhat incorporate it into whenever I'm talking to students.

I started to frame it for myself first as an 80-20 rule.

80% known, 20% unknown.

Because that 80% just ensures that I'm not biting off too much at once.

And that 20%... is the actual excitement of the piece.

It's like what drives me.

I don't design a piece unless I know it's going to push me both conceptually and technically in a way that I haven't done before.

I think that artists often think they understand creativity and they think they know their own creativity, and then their creativity surprises them, shocks them in some ways, for better or for worse.

And it's interesting that everyone's creativity is a little bit different.

I see people's practices almost like different typologies of trees.

Some people are like a spruce tree where they have like a single trunk and they have different tiers to it.