The internet sometimes turns up gold. It was thus when I met fellow @a_nartblogs superblogger Elena Thomas online just over a year ago.
Yesterday we made it into real time, meeting for the first time at the curious edifice that is the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham. Bless it’s cotton socks!
I know the MAC and the MAC knows me – for this is one of the places in which my artistic career was forged, when as a child of seven my mother used to bring me to kids art classes on a Saturday morning. That was another MAC – a smaller, homelier, grubbier MAC, which I happened to love. I loved the pottery room especially, and the theatre. As a teenager I later grew to love the bookshop, and a grimy but cheerful cafe. What I loved most was the simplicity of the structure of this modest hub of creativity – you knew where you were at all times. It seemed to work – it worked for me.
But MAC has changed, MAC has rebuilt itself, MAC is now bionic MAC. MAC both is and isn’t my MAC anymore. Millions have been pumped into MAC and MAC now has extensions and braids – I’m sure some things work well but to me it looks like a tangle.
But the blessing is that it is half a mile up the road from my childhood home and a convenient location for Elena too. Her songwriter’s circle meet here once a week and so for her also it’s a home from home. And this is how it is. Easy.
We talk and talk. We eat identical food and both hate gerkins. She has my onion ring as I don’t like them and she didn’t get one. Several pots of tea in, we realise we’ve talked for hours. We mention Spoon Theory:
http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/
The idea that for some of us social (and other) exertions take more energy than we have, invisible disabilities such as ME and autism can render the every day stuff incredibly challenging. Spoon theory has caught on as a shorthand for this idea and is used now in blogs and in every day communications.
We agreed that we both need to count our social spoons. I wonder how many artists feel this way. It’s a profession which requires very much alone time, so it could be that by association it is those who need and crave time alone who chose this kind of work. Although, there will, of course, be intensely socially engaged practices that prove the exception to this this rule or observation. I am thinking Andy Warhol and factory here.
However, spoons persist in our conversation. I envisage spoon assemblages. Elena is thinking beads and fabric. Elena pays me the compliment of a lifetime. I give her spoons! I realise she gives me spoons too. Easy. No drain.
Elena is an extraordinary person, which is why she’s such a brilliant artist. I love her work, and if we’d never met I’d still say the same.
So I look forward to more tea, more spoons, more talk, more beads, more fabric.
