The crisis of confidence is dissipating, and now I have actually hung it in the gallery I am quite pleased with how it all relates. It was an awkward, bitty place to install work, windows and doors, pillars and other things I am not able to move. At the beginning of the task we were falling over stuff, each other, tools and step ladder. But now it is done and I’m happy. Or as happy as I am ever going to be! I must thank my friends who helped, enormously, because without them I really wouldn’t have been able to do it. Helen Garbett (aka LimpetWoman*) and Rick Sanders (aka Willis the Poet*) are lovely people, and they both know my work well so felt able to suggest things, especially towards the end of the morning when I had clearly started to flag.
Having good people around you is vital to a happy life!
And so… I look at it all… Art is after all, made to be looked at.
For me, it is the way I make sense of the world and think about the things that bother me. It’s how I question myself. In recent times it is also how I question the world. And today I find it is my way of protesting about the injustices I find myself assaulted by in the news and social media.
But my problem is, my work is quiet. It is gentle, soft… not necessarily pretty, but it is soft. The lines are tender, considered. It isn’t bright, it doesn’t shout. It is unlikely to shock or shake anyone into action. But it is the work I make, I can’t think of me making work any other way, it’s like a fingerprint or a signature.
So what can I do? Talk about it more? While it is up in the ground floor gallery in the RBSA I will talk about it as much as I can, to tell people about the children it is made for. The families, communities and society they live in. It is about gathering them in, protecting them, standing up for them and saying “No more”. If I can’t make work that is noisy, maybe I need to be noisier in the way I talk about it, and the things I am bombarded with every day that keep me considering and making.
I am the daughter of immigrants, who has the good fortune to be white. But I can’t rest on my laurels. I need to be noisier in my position of relative privilege. The extreme right wing must be stopped in their inhuman behaviours. I don’t know what I can do…
Can I dump all things Meta? It’s easy for me to say I’ll never drive a Tesla because I could never afford one anyway. There are alternatives to Amazon. It’d be easy for me to give up beetroot for lent because I loathe it. But I kind of love what I have been able to do through Facebook and Instagram. But now I feel betrayed. It is no longer what it once was.
I have a Substack and a Bluesky account, and I believe Bluesky will be launching soon an alternative to Instagram.
All I need to do is make the decision and delete the accounts that make me feel complicit in terrible things.
I write this here, so that I can’t wriggle out of it later.
*I need an alias!
