At the Edge of Finding Out

Turner Prize winning artist Nnena Kalu, who has studio practice at ActionSpace in London, England.

Discovery isn’t a deliverable.

It’s not a thing to be handed over, translated, or explained in advance.

It’s an event.

It’s something you approach, hesitate at, and eventually step into.

And importantly, it’s an event that only works - at a deep, lasting level - when the person who encounters it is also the author of that moment, even as the conditions of the environment and a modeled attitude of curiosity have been carefully shaped by a facilitator.

In the studio, this is why scripting someone else’s discovery always rings hollow. You can show a technique, set up materials, or point toward a possibility - but the moment where something is crossed, from not known into felt, can’t be imported from the outside.

That crossing happens at a narrow edge - where curiosity outweighs certainty, where interest pulls harder than instruction. It isn’t a place you arrive at and stay; it’s something you move along, return to, and sometimes retreat from. Discovery carries a particular tension here, balancing at the apex between not knowing and knowing. It’s a place that can be revisited - each time uniquely - but never occupied for long. It will always tip in one direction or the other. That’s where agency emerges - not through instruction, but through the pull of wanting to find out.

This is also why certain artwork carries a particular charge. You can feel when an artist wasn’t merely executing an idea but finding it - when the work bears traces of having been made in motion, not fully decided in advance. There’s often a looseness, a generosity, sometimes even a slight misalignment that signals play. The work holds evidence of pleasure - not polish alone, but presence.

The goal isn’t mastery as control; it’s mastery as the ability to set the stage for being surprised. Discovery becomes something you can rehearse - not by repeating outcomes, but by repeatedly entering situations where the outcome isn’t fully known and the challenge feels just within reach.

Facilitation, at its best, doesn’t steal that moment. It protects it. This is where the facilitator works with productive tension - introducing challenge with enough charge to stimulate curiosity, and even a measure of frustration, but not so much that engagement collapses, and not so little that it fades into an afterthought. It’s a careful calibration, guided by attention rather than instruction.

This calibration matters. It doesn’t mean withholding support, but pacing it - so the experience remains authored by the person encountering it. A facilitator can lead someone to the edge of discovery, shaping conditions and modeling curiosity, but they can’t cross that border for them. When this is done well, something important happens. Familiarity grows. Confidence builds. Artists become motivated to return to that edge on their own terms - each time meeting the tension differently, and making something of it for themselves.