Wow! This little blog has been selected (along with Jane Boyer’s wonderful, thoughtful blog Working in Isolation) as one of this month’s Choice Blogs! Many thanks to Sarah Rowles – though I have to confess, I’m more than a little panicked. Being a shy/private person and writing a blog is very much like being a shy/private person and being an artist: you have to tell yourself that nobody is listening, that you’re talking to yourself, otherwise the whole endeavour will collapse beneath the weight of it all.
Having said that, this has motivated me to start working a little harder on this blog once again – I’ve been rather disorganised, and let other concerns overtake my writing, though the impulse remains, stutter-starting sadly, like an engine with no fuel. For me, process and progress are inextricably linked, so it’s good to feel this sense of reinvigoration – however shy or embarrassed I may feel about the exposure! A reminder that sometimes putting oneself out there is necessary – that, perhaps, not all things can be resolved internally.
How can art best engage with and influence the world, and the way that we engage with the world? How does art fit in to the wider idea of how I want to live and be understood? How should I measure success – and is it possible to be successful whilst preserving my ethics and integrity? Can I find a new way of being an artist?
These are the questions that fascinate me.
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At the moment I’m obsessed with silence and solitude. I’m reading A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which is a hybrid beast: part autobiography, part history, part philosophical treatise. It’s reaffirming a lot of my ideas, and inspiring plenty of new ones, too. The use of silences and absences in (and as) artworks is something that I want to explore further – art as a context is so much about presence, object, noise and commodity (and often, sadly, gimmicks) that there is almost something subversive about silence and quietness.
