An intense two days in front of the computer proofreading, second round, all the exhibitors’ text, articles, and image captions for the Supermarket Art Fair catalogue and magazine. I enjoy doing it, and even get a modest fee, but it’s always stressful when the deadline is approaching. This year I have a lot of other things on so it seems particularly intense. Yesterday I found myself thinking how different it will be next year when I won’t be working in Enköping and the Easter holiday won’t mean a clash of demands – kids’ creative activity programme and last minute proofreading. I might even get to take a long weekend!
I have had nothing but encouragement and excitement from my fellow artists at the studio as I let them know that I have taken a sabbatical. Their support is so very important to me – it makes me believe that things will work out, or at the very least that I am doing the right thing.
It feels as though I have lost a large amount of my identity over the past few years … an identity that was always rather fragile even at the best of times … it feels as though it is essential that I reclaim, re-establish, something of it now before too much slips away. I need to indulge myself in the experimental, in the crazy, in the exciting, in the messy, in the unknown, in the unaccountable … ah yes – the unaccountable, so different from the accountable … I don’t want to be accountable to anyone but myself for a while – isn’t that what artistic freedom is about … the freedom to be the artist that one needs to be.
Why has it taken me so long to realise that being employed by a local authority requires a level of accountability that would be detrimental to my well being? Accountability in a broad sense – from being in the office on regular days at regular times through to always feeling that I have to deliver something that at least meets if not exceeds the politicians and bureaucrats expectations. There is no longer any space for play and experimentation working for a small town council. It just doesn’t suit me. And now that I have seen that the only thing to do is to get out!
So … if I take this sabbatical as a second foundation year I can spend the time working out what kind of artist I want to, and can, be … exploring my options … learning by doing … paying attention to both what attracts me (commissions, opportunities, work) and also who/what is attracted to me. I don’t have to know now where I will be in a year’s time.
Before leaving the studio yesterday I felt that I had to doing something material … something with material … something with my hands … something creative … something visual. I made another of the ’tie drapes’ – purple this time. There were fewer purple ties than there were pink, blue, and yellow and this momentarily concerned me but as the piece evolved in the studio wall shared with the other pieces I found a pleasure in each of them having their own character … their own weight … their own identity.
The other evening, possibly whilst washing-up, I found myself wondering what to say about my work – I have to write an artist’s statement for the upcoming exhibitions. I always find it hard to know what to say … how to say something relevant, appropriate, accessible without being prescriptive, restrictive, obtuse. I started thinking about status – the status of things … of people … of places … of ideas … of lives. Perhaps if there has been, and is, a red-thread running through all the things that I have done then it has to do with exploring status – the position of something in relation to other things … how status is constructed, expressed, understood, used, experienced, maintained, challenged. Status is personal, cultural, social, political … it is more than simply being the condition of something … it something about how that condition is perceived and valued … it is inherently relational. And that is what I think I have always been interested in. I am excited to think about this more and to see if I can fashion a text around it … in Swedish!
