A quick glance over my shoulder, before moving forward

Just as we are about to turn the page into a new year I like to look back over the 12 months I'm leaving - to prepare myself for the new journey if nothing else.  I like to summarise as much as possible, so that some element of this year can serve as a starting point if necessary for my thoughts in the immediate future.  I am very much looking forward to thinking, looking, experimenting afresh in 2012; building on experience rather than repeating it, and I want to take a useful nugget from this year into next.
Two exhibitions remain at the forefront of my memory - above the others which also provided much nourishing input - and those are the Basketry exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts which I saw in April, and the Bite-Size exhibition of miniature textiles which I saw more recently (and wrote about here, here, here, and here).  As ever, it was a conjunction of memories from these two with other small elements which suddenly came together to form a coherent area for further thought.
I had seen a fascinating exhibition of paintings and prints by Jaakko Mattila: Lowest Common Denominator.  The paintings have a meticulous look from the front, but I was surprised to see that the edges of the canvas had been left, so that indeed the viewer was very much aware that it was a canvas that one was looking at.  This was a kind of shock as it is not what one thinks of when first encountering the work - and certainly not seen on Mattila's website.  That niggle stayed out of sight in my brain, just waiting to find its companion thoughts.
I had signed up for a short afternoon seminar at the end of November on Writing about Craft at the Craft Study Centre.  It was there that things clicked.  I came away from the seminar with the idea that the main, perhaps the only difference between writing about craft and writing about art is the subject of materiality.  I had argued with another participant that when one looks at a Rothko one does not think about the canvas he used.  But then driving home I remembered that niggle - that looking at Mattila's canvases did deepen and widen my thoughts about his paintings.  I did think about the materiality of his work.
Then that took me back to my thinking about Edmund de Waal's vitrines of ceramics.  Looking at a ceramic object brings to mind the feel of it - its material.  Looking at a combined display of chosen ceramic objects brings to mind not only the feel of the material, but also opens all sorts of other associations.  Looking at the ceramics through a glass, or even a glass darkly in some cases, somehow begins to deprive us of its materiality as initial impact.  We are now looking at sculpture where idea and materiality combine to make their impact and indeed de Waal had a piece: Untitled, 2011 in this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (scroll down the link to see a pic.) which was firmly in the category wall sculpture.  But the materiality is still a vital ingredient - one still needs to have that genuine touch/thought response.

Edmund de Waal: Reading at Night 1/3, 2011 (A series of 3 sprayed black aluminium cabinets each containing thrown porcelain vessels in varying glazes and covered with opaque glass.)

I am not making a point about the difference between art and craft (in the main I find that a waste of time); but am interested in exploring my own work and where my thoughts, ideas, and designs will go from now.  I have been treading water for quite a while now, and tentative paddling has started me in one direction trying out designs (like the one at the top of this post) which I like so far, ... but which do not fit comfortably into a previously used category of stitching.