Barcelona in a Bag

Is it true that artists are only as good as their last work? No.

But this is how it often feels.

In reality what we might call a body of work stacks up – but if you have a poor memory this somewhat quiet process can begin to feel like a deathly hush.

This is probably why I took to Twitter yesterday – not exactly to blow my own trumpet – but to remind myself what I did.

What feels entirely true is that each time you end a piece of work, especially a complex multilayered project, you have to start from scratch to build the new work or project in development.

Patience is needed and stamina gathered – I’m still processing and filtering what I went through to get to all these places, and how to build a secure pathway through to the next adventure.

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A period of drift continues and segues into the Christmas holidays. A single trip to my studio brought a near resolution of one piece, which you can see in the photograph above. It’s been years in the making so it’s great to have it finally take shape.

It was wonderful to be at work again and feel the connection to the making side of my artistic practice, knowing that this space exists in my studio and can be returned to is crucial to my ongoing sense of truly ‘being an artist’, when life pulls me in the opposite direction.

Like many artists I juggle several commitments. My family needs me – I am a carer.

I’m also a person.

Huh. Does this need saying? Yes, I think it does. Because we aren’t machines – we must put on our professional clothes as artists and present an image to the world. But…we are people, ordinary people observing a terrifying spectacle of a rapid shift in world order and our democratic processes rendered threadbare.

The very platforms that enable some of us to flourish as professionals have (it seems) also been agents of this flux. Turbulence of the kind sometimes experienced when an aeroplane hits bad weather usually passes – you hold onto your seat knowing that there’s a good chance you’ll soon breathe easy.
This feels different.

My practice is about war, oppression and dictatorship, sprung from 1930s European fascism, and it’s hard not to draw parallels with contemporary events.

How to respond to this bewildering age is more challenging – so many channels, so much ‘information’ and seemingly random acts of terror (I use the term broadly). There is probably nothing new in human impulse and behaviour, but now the tools are available to spread ideas in image and print beyond human processing speed. It’s all so instant. Worse we can no longer trust what we see (if we ever really could). We are reeling from the horror of Aleppo and the baseness of national populism (Nigel Farage’s comments about Brendan Cox and the Hope not Hate organisation, for example, have hit a new low).

Yes – and it’s frightening to see the US president elect Tweet with the exact lack of care of a “D rate” celebrity like arch provocatrix Katie Hopkins. It’s a reasonable comparison except for the powers and responsibilities each hold, but that’s my point.

How do these people gain such a foothold I ask? Why are their voices given such powerful amplification? I’m rarely this specific about politics in the present day when I blog, but yesterday something snapped.

I fail to keep a hold. This feels silencing. So I turn to what I know. The past.

I weather the storm by piecing together fragments for an installation with the title, They Slept in the Forest. The other pieces in this evolving set of responses to the Nazi round up (of almost 1,000 Spanish Republican exiles in Angoulême, France, 1940) my grandparents evaded, are collages which hang together precariously. This seems fitting.

I take refuge in making at home too. This year I would like Christmas to take care of itself as I’m too busy sewing. They’re modest projects – cushions and a blind (made ad hoc in the same way that I make everything with a combination of precision (a modicum of measuring) and plenty of eye.

The blind is fractionally short – a product of economising on fabric and a last minute feature (a crucial add on) which took up vital millimetres. Last night I drifted off to sleep wracking the little grey cells over a possible solution. The trick will be to find a trim that looks like it was meant to be there from the beginning. Like I planned it that way.

Perhaps my hands know what I’m best off doing. Comfort and inventiveness have never seemed more needed.

I’m tending the shelter.

I am drifting. Having spent so many months intensely focused on my ACE funded project, Through An Artist’s Eye, I am now adrift.

I’m also not well. Winter lurgy (my second of the season) is compounding this sense of distancing – the outside world seems remote and fuzzy. I pad about in slippers and an odd assortment of bed and day clothes lacking the necessary coordination for stepping over the doorstep.

I have some intensive parenting to take care of too. Stuff which is so important I can’t afford to get drawn too deeply into my work for the next week or so.

The studio in any case will be freezing.

So I’m blogging to fan the embers. I’m blogging to tell myself I’m really not as far away from my practice as I feel right now – and it’s true. I’ve been gathering kindling in my own slow and unmethodical way. I think as artists we have to trust ourselves in these moments of seeming inaction.

I know that I’m processing – that I have so much to pull from all my recent experiences that it’s difficult to find my way.

But exciting prospects hover close by.

For now I’m happy to make hot chocolate and drift.

They Slept in a Forest © Sonia Boué 2016

I have been away on an absorbing project about a British antifascist artist called Felicia Browne who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

But now the ghosts in the studio are stirring and I’m back to the origins of my work, back to the heart of my practice; my family history rooted in the traumatic and bloody Spanish Civil War.

Two days before my Felicia Browne work was to be installed I returned to my studio – the project had taken me away from studio work into filmmaking, writing and project management. All that was finally done – and I picked up an old board and instinctively brought in a new element of collage using two family photographs. The narrative of my family’s rupture is contained in two photographs – the one of my grandparents has been with me forever but I had no concept of its meaning until I began Barcelona in a Bag back in 2013. The photograph of my father was a later find but its significance has come to prominence in its use as part of the Felicia Browne exhibition – demonstrating our intersecting histories.

This work will form part of a small installation, which is slowly evolving, but already the elements are gathering. I’d planned to take my time and sit on this work until it was ready, but I can’t. World events mean that however little one person can make a difference not speaking up is far worse.

The narrative I will be working with is of a Nazi roundup of almost a thousand Spanish Republicans on 24th August 1940 at Angoulême. This was where my grandparents and great grandmother were living in exile, they had been released from internment camps and were living in rented accommodation and working in a munitions factory. Somehow they evaded the roundup and did not board a train carrying refugees to the Mauthausen “work” camp.

My mother has been the keeper of a fragment of oral testimony to this moment. The title of my piece will be They Slept in the Forest.

This is what we know, and this is all we know – that they evaded capture by spending a night in a nearby forest. They knew.

How they knew and what they knew remain unknown.

To show my work I need a gallery space. The hunt is on.

Photo by Philip King.

It’s been a very long time since I blogged in this space as I’m currently working on an ACE funded project which I write about on Through An Artist’s Eye.

What has brought me back here is the viral “cheat sheet” recently reported on by a-n, and created by artist Rachel Dobbs, for artists to use when applying for ACE funding.

Click on the link above and you will see that I am name checked. I’m also credited in the original article about this on a-n.

“Hobbs…refers to artist and a-n blogger Sonia Boué’s words on the subject.

The Grants for the Arts application portal came under the spotlight earlier this year when Boué released a video plea to Arts Council England to make its forms more accessible to applicants with neurodivergent brains.

In her video, Boué describes how the linear sequence of the current application system is at odds with the way many neurodiverse brains function. She suggests that there need to be more ways of presenting information to funders.”

I’ve been astonished to learn that I could have had such an impact with my video, and it is heartening to be taken seriously by my profession when talking about neurodivergence.

The ‘cheat sheet” is a fascinating development, but I remain wary because social biases in the present system remain – and these work against autistic artists. It’s not just the Grantium portal and the online form which are so particularly inaccessible for autistic artists. Socially biased expectations run through the application process (as a whole) and continue to hold us back as a group; and hidden social codes permeate all aspects of professional life and advancement in the arts. The problem runs much deeper than a short cut, however welcome the ‘cheat sheet’ might be in cracking the a specific code that of the Grantium portal.

The difficulty remains however, as there are still autistic artists (those known of and many more who remain invisible even to our growing autistic network) so intimidated by the application process (in toto) that they are prevented from applying for ACE grant awards. You can say the same of many neurotypical artists perhaps, but the causes will be quite different – and this is what is worth teasing out.

I have been fortunate to find my way through this quite recently – but there are others who are not able to reach the point of project development expected of an application under the present system. This is due to the multiple social demands required to get there, and the fundamental differences in the ways in which autistic artists might arrive at a creative practice and perform as professionals.

We are yet to achieve parity for autistic artists, and it is important to keep talking about that. We need to move beyond the ‘cheat sheet’ and we will.