Bare Bones

Back home from a week in Cornwall, our first real proper, grown up holiday, – not the usual house sitting that we do for friends while they jet off somewhere nicer that they’ve actually paid for. All that time to rest. Now that I can see how tired I was I don’t want to go back to how things were.

Our house sitter, Richard, did a sterling job, only managed to break the fridge door, Samuel’s BB gun and injure the dogs hind leg – not bad going for him! (he makes up for it though by fixing other things for us – and we love him).

I didn’t go back in the studio for three days. In all honesty, I was scared – of how the work would appear to me after a break away. But I did – and I’m not sure how I feel… (sorry about the poor qality images, I can’t get them to resize properly and I will lose the will to live if I try again)

It’s always an interesting diversion to google yourself and see what comes up, what other Susan Francis’s are out there doing, living with the same name in some strange pararellel existance.

I have many Susan Francis’s I like, the first is a lawyer, a clever and responsible grown-up of a Susan, the second an astronaut, I see her on google images sometimes with her helmet proudly under her arm.

Another Susan is sadly a victim of mind control, her thoughts controlled by US intelligience using far off brain invasion weapons from outer space. She is often urged into romantic relations with spys/aliens, she’s not sure yet.

More recently Susan Francis, the animal artist, has arrived from the US on google. An example of her work is pictured. This perturbs me. Will curators, scanning for my work assume I have diversied?, perhaps I should assume her identity in the UK, it wouldn’t really be stealing, as I am really Susan Francis and an artist.

I am collecting all these Susan Francis’s for a piece of work, quite separate from the other stuff I do. But for now, I wish them well.

I share Rachel Howfields reticence to label my work, most especially to label it ‘feminist’. I have visions in my head if I do so, of all the people who will instantly shut off. About a month ago, while on a break from the wellie wanging stall at the summer fair, I was introduced to an artist. He asked me what I was up to and I gave him a quick run down.

‘You got funding! he said rather disdainfully, ‘Wow – well, you’re a woman see – it’s easier for you’

‘But you’re an ethnic minority’ I said affronted ‘That trumps me’.

In our house, we’re hotly competitive as objects of discrimination. (my partner is half Trinidadian) This boiled over at a recent dinner with friends. Barack Obama was heard to call a female journalist ‘Sweetie’. I found that offensive, my partner thought I was overeacting, and so the battle was on. Who has suffered most down the ages, gender or skin colour – it makes for a lively debate – but I don’t think I’d recommend it for a dinner party!

After a fractious night, me awake panicking about having another hypo, my partner awake worrying about the proposed redundancies at work, I got up at 6am to grab a couple of hours in the studio before the children were awake.

It was fairly productive actually but I’m still at the experimental stage with lots of things, half the time I think that’s where I’m happiest existing as an artist. At the moment I’m working with drawings that ‘disappear’ after a day or so. Perhaps there’s some way to use stop gap photography, I really need a week entirely to myself to try things out.

This journey has been an emotional and creative roller coaster for me. Many artists have articulated the patches of insecurity we all go through but Andrew Bryant has touched on a particular one of mine.

‘Have I found my practice?’ he dropped into a recent email. Are we pressured to define our practice in order to make a win on the slot machine of grant funding, gallery exhibitions etc?

Mmm – the very questions that have been niggling uncomfortably away at me since returning to exhibiting in 2007. Can artists work authentically while ticking the boxes of the funding providers?

For me, returning to the system after a decade of raising family, I had to learn fast. I wanted to work, I needed to work, I had a cast iron background behind me of projects fulfilled and funding utilised effectively and I was confident I could make good use of this money. And so I set about getting the proposal right.

There’s no question about it, I honed and shaped and fashioned that proposal to fit the required criteria which in many cases I’m sure stifles and curtails the creative process. In all honesty though, for me, at that time, in that circumstance, it focused and informed my work in a way I could never have managed alone in my studio. Time and time again I relooked at the aims, the timings, the proposed outcomes etc of what I planned to do and reshaped and refocused them. I really feel this gave a structure to work to which has envigourated my practice and encouraged an even more deeply reflective attitude to what I do.

The danger is, however, that one approach cannot suit all. Narrowing the range of what’s acceptable and demanding that artists articulate their practice in such a way must mean many artists just fall off the radar. And I think that is a great loss.

The visual arts of today is a scary place to the one I left in the nineties. If you can’t fulfill the growing range of attributes that are asked of you, creatively, intellectually, socially, then you may be asked to step aside. If this had been the criteria in the past, how many of the great artists would be there. If we are not more flexible in our understanding of how and if an artist can ever ultimately define their practice in such a way, I think we’re in grave danger of the visual arts being the poorer because of it.

Prior to writing this I’ve been watching TV – a lot of it. Yesterday I had my first diabetic hypo, alone with my children – not something I ever wish to experience again, and today? Today I’m not going to lift a pencil to draw as planned, in fact art feels quite far away. I’m going to do nothing, and just concentrate on feeling safe, with my family around me.