"Today's art audiences are more curious than ever about the thought process - in the good old days, it used to be called "inspiration" - that leads up to the creation of what we are shown in galleries and museums. Whether or not it is art at all seems to depend more and more on where it come from, rather than what it looks like.

Such issues have been examined with admirable tenacity in a series of exhibitions at the Islip Museum in East Islip, under the directorship of Madeleine Burnside. The current show, "Preparation and Proposition", addresses the means by which artists make tangible their imaginings. No exhibition can illustrate the mind's workings in its own language, since thoughts are not visible; but while they cannot be seen here, they are at least in evidence.

This is not pure conceptual art, where information, transmitted to the viewer via words or symbols, passes directly from mind to mind without intermediary translation into an artwork. Instead, we see art as an outcome of mental and physical activity, so that the objects created are more clearly the result and reflection of these processes.

Ten artists are represented, two by drawings related to large-scale constructions not on view (a slide show illustrates their work at other sites), and the rest by installations or projects in the galleries and outside on the grounds, most with supplementary drawings. In addition, a program of performances deals with sight, sound and movement as aspects of art as experience.

The artists who most clearly show the link between idea and realization are those whose drawings are directly related to their sculpture. The works on paper are seldom actual plans or sketches, but they illuminate aspects of the three-dimensional pieces that might otherwise remain unappreciated.

Betty Collings, for example, makes translucent hanging forms of inflated plastic coated with resin. Each piece is contructed of joined segments that, as we see in the diagrams on the wall, are extended spirals that complement one another like yang and yin. The forms are based on geometry, yet the artist has transformed them into undulating masses that suggest primitive life. This transformation, as much as the resulting sculpture, is the work of art. …"