London Creativity and Wellbeing Week

'only in artworks do rock, metal, and color first become what they are rather than being absorbed and suppressed by some ulterior function. Both masons and sculptors use stone. The difference is that the mason uses up the stone by fully assigning it to some practical purpose, while the sculptor lets the stone shine forth as what it is. In sculpture the earth comes forth, yet it remains a shelter. By showing the earth as a shelter rather than as material useful for our purposes, it is what first lets the earth be earth…Beauty is the shining of earth as earth, made visible in the world.’ Harman 2007



The world needs the self to be seen and acquire direction, and so the self needs to encounter worldly objects to have meaning and be really present and concrete rather than merely abstract or gaseous. Things offer the material conditions for the substantiality and purposefulness of our existence, and yet in our everyday life we tend to overlook and take objects for granted, see them as inert presence or dead matter, use them in instrumental and calculative ways that divest them of their full reality and significance and trivialise them into caricatures. The restriction of the empirical to the subjective cuts-off, inflates and ultimately annihilates both 'subjects' and 'objects'.

Art rehabilitates our anaesthetised and detached relation to the world and shifts our orientation from the ordinary default dead-worldview of objects usability to the intimate appreciation of their inherent value, intentionality and receptivity as animate and active parts of the world with intrinsic worth, vitality and importance.

This participatory tour of Simeon Nelson’s Studio articulated in conversation with psychologist Monia Brizzi will offer an experiential opportunity of reconnecting to the heart of matter and be restored to the world of sense by the mystery and nourishment of things.