I started this blog when I lost my studio but this week I have been feeling the loss of something else. The book I applied for from New York City as part of the Sketchbook Project is nowhere to be be seen and I’ve had to accept that it’s not going to turn up.
At the start of last year during a quiet period I felt I needed something tangible to work on and weighed up the pros and cons of shelling out money to take part in the Sketchbook Project. I decided to go for it, spurred on by the fact that two beloved friends in Chicago could share in it by visiting and viewing my book as it toured the States.
After an initial burst of activity, the sketch book got put to one side. But when I was suddenly studio-less, I found it became a source of comfort to me. It was something I could work on around the kitchen table after all, and having it helped me focus my thoughts away from the studio situation and towards continuing to produce art.
I rarely work on paper so this was an experiment for me in many ways but once I started, I soon got into making my own mark on it through text, drawing and collage. The work felt different and challenging and (technical and drawing abilities aside!) I was looking forward to it growing into something quite personal and special.
I still had a long way to go with it, but the loss has upset me – partly because it means I won’t get the chance to complete it and partly because some precious vintage magazine cuttings were lost inside it. These had been collected and stored for many years waiting for just the right moment to use them – all gone! Will I ever see them again, I wonder?
I’m just not in the habit of losing things – not on a long term basis, anyway – and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised that the loss of the sketch book is a casualty of not having a studio. My working materials and personal collections are generally very well looked after, ordered and controlled. However chaotic things might appear on the surface in my studio, I always have a keen sense of where things are. The sketch book would ordinarily have stayed in the studio, its precise location known.
I now realise that the act of Keeping It Together applies as much to the materials I use for my work as it does to my state of mind. The loss of the sketch book has ultimately been about not keeping it together and so, just as I’ve felt ‘all over the place’ in my head at times, so too have my working materials been, quite literally, all over the place.
It’s becoming clear to me that having a studio means much more to me than just the physical space. As well as being a place to house my vast collection of stuff, there’s something that happens for me in the studio that goes far beyond this. A studio anchors me, effectively containing the feelings and emotions associated with digging up the past and unravelling a lifetime of memories and all the associated paraphernalia that goes with them. My collections are not so much about what I collect as they are about how they define me – the sifting, the sorting, the placing is an integral part of the whole process and my relationship with the things I’ve collected over so many years is an intimate one.
Small wonder then that I haven’t created anything of significance in the past two weeks or so, because if truth be told, however positive a spin I try to put on it, without my things around me, I too have been feeling quite lost.
