Decisions Over Destination

Artist Linda Bell installing her work at the A New Direction, I Am Festival, in London 2022

Choice and decision are often used interchangeably, but they don’t always function in the same way.

A choice can be made repeatedly without consequence. It can be habitual, automatic, even invisible. If a drawer holds six identical pairs of socks, reaching for the nearest pair each morning requires no interpretation, no reflection, and no deduction. The act is technically a choice, but it does not accumulate understanding. Tomorrow’s choice will look exactly like today’s.

A decision, by contrast, carries information forward. It is shaped by noticing, preference, memory, and consequence. It alters what comes next.

This distinction matters deeply in supported studio environments.

A studio facilitator does not guide decisions by pointing toward outcomes, but by shaping the conditions in which decision-making can occur. Nor do they protect authorship by limiting access to information in the name of neutrality.

Their role sits in a more careful space: introducing difference and information - materials, qualities, possibilities - in ways and at a pace that allows them to be absorbed, used, and folded into what comes next.

Returning to the sock drawer, facilitation - and good support, including the work of any direct support provider - does not mean telling someone which socks to wear. It means expanding what socks could be: variations in material, thickness, color, pattern, texture, and weight. Time is given for those differences to be felt, compared, rejected, favored, or ignored. Over time, the wearer begins to recognize what matters to them and why.

These experiences cannot be fully shared through conversation alone. The body has to register them - the feel, the resistance, the comfort, the knowing that comes through direct contact.

From these experiences, decisions begin to articulate what matters.

What to wear.

When.

How.

Where.

And for what reason.

A facilitating artist extends that same foundation into a different kind of practice.

A facilitating artist does not stop at helping someone choose between options. They help the sock-wearer recognize that the information they have gathered - about softness, pressure, stretch, warmth, resistance - can be used. That experience can be shaped into knowledge, and knowledge into action.

The sock can become something else.

• It can be taken apart and reassembled.

• It can be stuffed and, with others, become something expansive - a soft chandelier or hanging installation.

• It can become a puppet or a painted surface.

• It can be inked and used as a stamp, or become the brush itself - carrying paint through pressure, movement, or touch.

• It can be used to experience and interpret containment, tension, comfort, or release.

The potential of a sock does not end when it is worn.

The facilitating artist reveals that materials are not fixed in purpose. Materials are collaborators. Each relationship is unique to the person shaping them and the context they bring to the experience. Each interaction builds familiarity, confidence, and discernment.

What matters is cultivating curiosity through decision-making, supported by sustained engagement with materials and processes that invite attention, exploration, and response. In this way, the artist becomes the author not only of what is made, but of their own discoveries.

This is not about guiding someone toward a destination.

It is about supporting someone in shaping a relationship with the world around them - one that continues to evolve through their own experiences.

Authorship lives here - not in the outcome, but in the growing ability to decide and to stay in dialogue with what is touched, shaped, and transformed.