As I start to look at different opportunities I wonder, what defines me as an artist? What is it that spurs me to create art, what am I really interested in? Is it just light or is it more. The post it note sculptures that I created when I was working in a job I hated, are they my art.
I need to define my work, I need to show possible funders what I’m all about, show them what I can bring to the art world. Maybe everything I create is art. I read today that Martin Creed gives all his art a number as he creates them, thus not defining them but giving them a chronological order, as though he just creates and then files. Is this relevant to my work.
So what is it that makes me want to create art, all my art starts with a conversation that I have with myself? I can have a hundred thoughts a minute and for me when I create my art something happens to me. I can have a conversation time and time again by myself through the things I create, without ever doing something to change that conversation, it is a regurgitation of a thought.
The easiest example that I can use to explain is my post it note sculptures. They were a conversation of me saying I hate the job that I am doing, but I know I must do it to pay the bills, I know that I need to do it and yet I just want to create something, something that is art and what better way to show this than a typical art piece, a sculpture and yet it is not your traditional sculpture, it is basic in its simple self, it is a cheap mass produced piece of paper, a piece of paper that is there to be scribbled on and then thrown away and yet I have changed it in to something more, something that I want to expand on, something that has longevity in it. I have also created the sculpture by wrapping the post it note around the corner of my desk, another by wrapping it around the mouse of the computer, another by wrapping it around the plug socket and so it goes on. I then move on, I use an old battered folder divider, I use this to wrap around the filing cabinets, the chair, and the desk again. I am literally wrapping this office that I hate in art, I am creating something that makes a barrier between me and the things that I hate. And there we have it, my breakthrough moment. I create art to deal with the things I hate, an argument in the home that I grew up in, I would go to my room and draw, a controlling boyfriend in my early adulthood, I would sit and draw him, a mother who as soon as I got home from school, without a word I would know that she was in one of her moods, I would create an experimental meal for my father to make him smile. My art became my way of dealing with the hate that surrounded me.
So that is how I became an artist, but what do I do now, this is what I shall be working on over the next few days or weeks.
