Artist Statement

Lu Bassett

If I can make anything, what should I make - and why?

My medium-agnostic art practice centers on the multisensory handling of art objects alongside the emotion-centered documentation of the encounters - be they physical, imaginary, or virtual - that led to their creation. Rather than focusing on the aesthetics of individual art objects, I investigate what art fundamentally is. Attempting to understand an art object through passive spectatorship is insufficient. Multisensory engagement, alongside documentation of the lived experience that generated the work, is necessary to access its full humanity.

If the encounter is where art resides, then my practice must record that, preserve it, and return to it - building an archive capable of generating work across any medium.

Working across stone carving, metalwork, painting, drawing, video, audio, and digital systems, my practice begins with the documentation of an emotionally significant experience. I capture the narrative of the experience, situational metadata (time, location, light, sound, physical sensation, etc.), and an initial interpretive analysis. These registers are not hierarchical but concurrent dimensions of the same event. Together they constitute a new entity: a reification of the encounter that persists independently of memory and can be revisited as generative material long after the immediacy of the original emotion has faded. This methodology is Affective Reification Architecture (ARA), and its primary instrument is the Reified Emotional Encounter Document (REED). This document then becomes the medium-agnostic basis for creative work generated from these encounters.

In practice, the REED appropriates the visual and procedural conventions of institutional documentation - diagnostic intake records, corporate reporting templates, archival metadata systems - and redirects their logic toward the capture of affective experience. This appropriation is structural rather than merely aesthetic. The forms that bureaucratic systems use to simplify and contain complexity are repurposed here to preserve it. The REED captures what precedes the work; what follows belongs to the artist's own materials and methods.

A recent work pairs a small painting and a stone carving with their originating REED document as co-equal components of a single artwork. Neither the painting, the sculpture, nor the documentation has primacy. Each component supplies what the other lacks: the documentation provides structure, specificity, and archival persistence, while the objects provide embodied presence; this relationship creates a new whole. Exhibition of this work requires that physical objects be handled together with documentation. This multisensory engagement returns the experience of the artwork to the body.

John Dewey argued in Art as Experience that aesthetic experience is lived experience at its most complete. I take this as a guiding principle: if art resides in the encounter, then my practice seeks to record its full richness so it can be preserved and revisited as creative material for new works.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin locates aura in the unique object, arguing that reproduction of the object erodes it. My practice takes a different view: aura resides in the embodied encounter between a person and a work, through multisensory engagement. Aura is not destroyed by reproduction but by disembodied spectatorship. Walls, plinths, and vitrines separate the viewer from the conditions in which aura emerges. Full sensory handling - even of a reproduction - restores it. The REED's appropriation of bureaucratic form is therefore a critical instrument twice over: it borrows the visual language of institutional documentation to preserve affective experience within systems designed to contain it, and in doing so exposes the limitations of those systems.

Where Conceptual Art relocated primacy from object to idea, ARA relocates primacy from object to embodied affective event. Conceptual Art’s dematerialization was a necessary critique of object fetishism, but it often displaced the sensory and emotional dimensions of encounter. ARA inherits that conceptual rigor while insisting those dimensions are not incidental to art but essential to it.

Art categories funnel people into medium-specific specializations, producing artists defined by what they make rather than why they make it. The immediacy of the emotional encounters that generate creative work is typically lost to memory and interpretation before they can be fully utilized as material. In my practice, ARA and the REED provide a structured medium-agnostic methodology for capturing and preserving those encounters. The framework is available to artists working in any medium - physical, digital, durational, or relational - and anchors lived experience at the center of artistic practice.