I’ve been preoccupied by the idea of ‘home’. The floods in Cornwall have transformed small, familiar places into news; a private & internal language made public. My family moved to Cornwall when I was 10, just at the tipping-point of childhood; a wide-open & impressionable time. The place embedded itself within me, & it is partly this happy accident of timing & location that I credit with my intense experience of the natural world. (Put a solitary, sensitive child onto a desolate moor & watch as the whole wildness of it floods into her.) Years later, having moved away, I met a boy from Bodmin. We spent three years living between the Cotswolds and Cornwall, taking turns at each; and I grew to love Cornwall even more. There’s a certain light, a certain silence, a certain quietness that consumes me when I’m there; a clarity & cleanness; a sense that all the clutter & superfluity has been shed, & that I am stripped back to the very barest truth of who I am. It’s a beautiful feeling, and I miss it, and the place that causes it, often. Hearing all these place names on the news triggered a huge resurgence of feelings – homesickness, fondness, nostalgia, wistfulness. I’ve been wondering if Cornwall might, ultimately, be my home.
But the main reason for my obsession with ‘home’ is that (with mere days to spare!) I’ve finally managed to find a new place to live. I’m having difficulty reconciling myself to the idea of no longer spending my mornings with the linden-tree across the road; nor having my horizon mapped by those same chimney-stacks and gabled rooves and poplars. I have lived here for just over two years, which is longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my extraordinarily nomadic adult life. I – unexpectedly, by stealth – have put down roots, have settled. But I must leave, and leave I must – within the coming week. My new flat is across the river, in a very unfamiliar area; it is quite lovely, though – and there is a second room, which I intend to use as a home studio. At last, a dedicated place for working in!
When I first came to Liverpool, I had planned to find a studio-space somewhere. I found that studios were either open-plan (not good for a shy and private person!), freezing cold (not good for somebody with clinically bad circulation) or perfect-but-massively-expensive. I came to realise, too, that from the outside, studio groups can seem almost like cliques; exclusive. (This could be simply because many of the main groups in Liverpool are, or have been, comprised of young graduates whose friendships were cemented at university.) There is also a tendency for outsiders to lump all artists in a studio group together as a cohesive whole, even though there might be clear and obvious differences in their work. Between these things, which troubled me, and the financial concerns, I settled on working at home, and found that I work best in seclusion and privacy. The intersection between art and domestic life interests me.
Working at home brings its own difficulties – distractions (from laundry to internet to playing with the cat), space (in a 1-bedroom flat, space is limited, and even the smallest of works require a surprising amount of space during their creation), isolation. Things like a break, a chat, critical support become difficult or impossible; you have to become very self-reliant, which might not always be healthy. Moreover, in Liverpool, and in my experience, an artist who is not a “known name”, did not graduate in the city and is not part of a studio group must be either incredibly forward and self-confident, or remain invisible. Additionally, studio group members are able to show their work more frequently at members’ shows, or as part of collaborations with other groups. There is almost a sense that one is less of an artist if one is not a member of a studio group. But all of these benefits, to me, cannot outweigh the fact that I make better work when I work from home.
I wonder if, and why, other artists actively choose to work at home.
