Making Meaning: The Art of the Act

Art gives us the ability to speak without speaking, and to listen without noise.

Before language, culture, and systems, there were shapes, lines, textures, sounds. We are born attuned to visual and sensory information. We respond to color the way we respond to a sunrise. We sense line and volume the way we recognize the curve of a body or the horizon breaking open before a storm. Art works through the body, not just the brain. It's not a translation of thought into symbol, but something deeper: a transfer of perception into presence.

Buried in the experience of art is all our empathy. All our humanity. It's the mirror we hold up to ourselves, not to see our features, but to feel them reflected in unfamiliar ways. To witness shape, space, or gesture and say, somehow, that’s me—even if I don’t understand why.

From the viewer’s perspective, this can be subtle or seismic. It might feel like the sun warming your face on a quiet beach, or, depending on the nature of the work, like being plunged into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Art becomes a mechanism not to escape ourselves, but to deepen contact with our own inner terrain. Art doesn't explain, it evokes. And in that evocation, we encounter parts of ourselves language cannot or hasn’t yet reached.

But from the artist’s side, the equation shifts. The act of making carries a different weight. It’s not just about perception; it's about processing.

As humans, we internalize experiences: thoughts, relationships, trauma, dreams, joy, contradictions. Our nervous system doesn’t just catalog these inputs—it churns them. Not like a blender, which pulverizes and smooths, but more like a cement mixer. The drum keeps turning. It builds mass, density, weight. And from that turning, we form blocks: composite units of experience that become the foundation for how we move through the world.

But in any construction, there's also a residue. An excess left over from that mixing process. A pressure, subtle or sharp, that demands our attention.

That residue is what compels the artist to act. It’s not a need to make something “beautiful”. It’s not a duty to the public. It’s not even always a conscious choice. It’s a buildup of energetic friction that finds release through material engagement. Through doing. Through making.

And not always for others.

There’s a common misconception, often pushed in arts education, that the artist’s role is to communicate, to translate inner life into some message to the viewer. But often, the compulsion to make art is not about clarity. It’s about survival. Expression doesn’t always seek to be understood; it seeks to exist. In the same way that a wound seeks air, artmaking is a form of exposure.

The outcome might be a painting, a sculpture, a sound, a structure. But the real thing—the art—is in the act. The object is a remainder. A byproduct of the real work, which is internal, physical, even spiritual.

Art becomes the only language available when words fail. It allows the artist to speak to something without needing to explain it. In that way, it's both private and public. Not a secret, but not an answer either. It’s more like a doorway: open but leading into terrain that can’t be mapped.

To quote philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writing on perception still resonates with contemporary artists:

"The painter 'takes his body with him,'... Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings."

In other words, the body is not a tool used by the mind—it is the site of meaning-making. It is the mediator between the world and the work. This is why the material process matters. Why it’s not just about concepts, but about touch, movement, friction. The studio is a testing ground for physical ideas.

Even when the artist doesn't fully understand what, or why, they’re making, the body understands something. It knows when a gesture feels right. It knows when the form begins to resonate. The intellect may catch up later. Or not at all.

And this brings us back to the viewer. Because in many ways, art exists in the tension between the maker’s impulse and the viewer’s response. But that doesn’t mean the viewer completes the work. As I’ve written previously, I don't believe in that idea—at least not in the romantic way it’s often pitched. The viewer experiences their own encounter, distinct from the artist’s. And that’s as it should be. The meaning isn’t fixed. It emerges, if it emerges at all, between body, material, and moment.

In that sense, art resists closure. It keeps things open. Unresolved.

We live in a world saturated with noise. Art can cut through it all. Not with clarity, but with depth. It doesn’t offer solutions. It holds space for contradiction. It allows us to feel more than one thing at once. To be both haunted and comforted. Disoriented and grounded. Human.

And so the act of making is not decoration. It is not commentary. It is not even expression, in the conventional sense. It is necessity. Not for everyone, but for those of us who feel that energetic residue building up inside. Like the cement mixer turning without pause, art becomes the only honest response.

Not to explain the world.

But to survive it.