Memory

Whitney Museum rooftop -image Adriane Miller

Memory of place in time is greatly attached to emotion and people, though sometimes fleeting moments they are sticky in how they can last a lifetime, entangling themselves within our minds and bodies, unearthing physical sensations.

Carl Barnett Design/Studio

Images of physical space, nuances and long embraces, move and float within our physical making, passing through pores, lose hair and clipped nails.

We are not our past in total, but we are the memories we choose to keep, looping them, pulling them, forward. Some experiences entrench themselves, moving through the mind’s sifter becoming blood memory, others exit the body through dreams, passing as ethereal clouds.

It is memory that helps to build our future, acting as guidepost, perimeters to what we wish to repeat and expand upon. Maps of past and present. Chalk on board. Raised hairs.

Felix Gonzalez-Toress - Whitney Museum

Process

Carl Barnett Design/Studio

Simplicity holds its place in life as contrast to the chaotic. Not as balance but intentional resolve, a place for respite, where the eye can rest and the mind can find clarity and question, deconstruct and strategize, listen for guidance from the gut.

It is the silence within the space of simplicity that coats experience, encapsulating the deepest effect. Where echoes of mind and body can best be heard, Morse code of the inner landscape. The unifying of silence and simplicity pierces the chaotic, pummels till order finds its footing. Funneling the process of change and resolve.

Carl Barnett Design/Studio - Untitled (10/03/16)

Within simplicity and the shell of silence we can better navigate our current challenges, find the meaning and focus our purpose, until chaos cracks the shell and process begins again. This is the push and the pull, the malleability of life creating, life destroying. The metaphorical vortex.

To challenge the chaotic is to create its opposing opposite, a space of windows, walls and oscillating doors. Mind, body and the physical world.

Layering

The layering of art, design and words are for me a mode of inspiration, smoothing the edges of our challenging era. A means to bolster, uplift and vacillate the coming future. This is what inspires me of others, of what my intention is focused upon, the built environment as tool for change.

Carl Barnett Design/Studio

My bias lies squarely within the creative arenas, they are I believe, relatable in their intuitive storytelling, fine-tuned to speak to the inner dialogue of fear and hope while dislodging the dogmatic. These are tools of the creative mind, backbone to meaning and purpose, resolve to the complications of contemporary life.

To better move forward one needs to understand this fundamental ideology of mind and body in time, to devour the creative spirit as means to an end. Nourishment for the long run.

Creativity

Creativity is a means to inspire, inform and question. Its own complex brand of hope and will. A vehicle of personal expression impacted in the DNA of our being, layered within the left hemisphere of the brain and woven in the gut.

It is creative curiosity that moves us forward, keeps us afloat as we face the uncertain and unfold the origamic riddle.

“We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing…Life feeds anyone who is open to taste its food, wonder, and glee - its immediacy.”

~ Anne Lamott

Carl Barnett Design/Studio

Within all the facets of our person, creativity in our contemporary world is the least easily replicated, not bound to the arena of the formulaic. This will be our telescope to the future, balance to the oncoming AI, climate change and deeper exploration of the star dusted universe.

This is not without its complications as humans we are fallible. Conflicts are implemented as guns are created, a cycle that fuels itself. Money made, money created.

Rest assured that everything has its underside, the bloom of the bush has its root rot, government tyranny, its voting booth. Uncertainty intwines the creative mind as the molecule fires and the muscles flex. This is creative cause and effect, what the present owns and around which the future is tethered. It is this that the creative mind navigates, empowers and eradicates. The future holds what the mind has written.

From the past we can see the evidence of the creative spirit, documents in stone and clay. The tool and the wheel. This is the creative gene expanding, morphing as it engulfs the problematic and foresees a new frontier. The cave becomes Parthenon, Icarus to aircraft and fire leads to the Anthropocene. The map of the creative mind is an M.C. Escher stairway, Felix Gonzalez-Toress’ dangling and clustered light bulbs.

Life is best viewed as a process of learning. All things created are in-turn destroyed by creativity. The past can inspire while the future can expand or erase. Will is the light to life’s creative path with failure as its underbelly.

Carl Barnett Design/Studio

The down side of the creative mind is that it is often held captive by the underdeveloped human brain. While well within the twenty-first century our flight or fight intuition plays havoc. The hunt and gatherer instinct sways our materialistic spiral down, as homelessness butts up against the crowd funding of a wall.

This however is not a doomsday account, I do not follow that mentality. The human mind and body is adaptable, malleable in its creativity and intuitive foresight. The myopic may raise its shadow but the creative will always shows its prowess.

Intention

The elements of design are tools of the trade, used to inspire and inform the utilitarian. They are not from my view point the main focus, but the support system to those who live within the spaces I design.

To create an immersive experience that inspires daily life and hope for the future is the intention, the overall arc of all I create.

Our world is challenged, the built environment should be the buffer between. What the democracy of design can do.