Today I find myself sitting in a hotel room pondering tomorrow. I have been given the opportunity to attend the a-n No Boundaries Conference in York and so I wait for a day to see what it brings. I don’t know anyone that is going and yet I am excited, I will be in a room, a building, a conference full of people wanting to talk about art. This concept is frilling and reminds me of my days at Uni, where artists would sit around and talk about our work. It is odd to me now to have this as I am no longer surrounded in my daily world by artists, I have friends that are artists, and even my sister is an artist, but that interaction where you talk just about art is something that does not happen when you are no longer in a studio environment. I love the solitude that I have in my one woman studio and my work has progressed so much, but what is it that a group studio brings?
Do I now ask myself, how do I talk to other artists? Do I need to join a group studio or can I network in another way?
I have joined group studios before but I found the politics of running a studio had a negative effect on my work and also you can’t always find a studio with artists that you feel a kinship to, in relation to your work. My work is very personal and there are times when I can feel very raw or indeed in tears, I don’t want a visual audience to this and in a studio it is hard for this not to happen. So my own studio works for me.
Does this mean that I then have to go to lots of art conferences or attend lots of art networking events? This is hard for me as I am a mother of two young children and I am a wife and I want to see my husband and family, to have time to sit and talk, time to go out and time to just walk together. Also I hate being away from them, as I sit in this hotel room all I keep thinking is that my girls will be tucked up in bed and this is normally the time when my husband and I sit down after our meal together and talk about our days and chat about the things that are important to us and the things going on in the world. Does my art world and home life have to be separate?
Not always, the girls love going to things with me, I took them to present my last piece of art work at the fracking camp and they loved it, but I can’t take them to everything they will soon get board of me talking and them sitting there listening. What about the internet?
The internet is a good way to see what people are up to and to get inspiration or to see how far your own practice can be pushed, but it’s not the same as a good chat. So what of tomorrow, the conference is a symposium on the role of the arts and culture in a world where there is no normal, but what exactly does this mean? The website says that a cultural map is being redrawn…by new behaviours….by new technologies, new models of funding and new local, national and global thinking. Well, all I can talk about is my own work and I know that the internet has had a massive effect on it, as for funding it, the opportunities that were open to me in the past are not available anymore. Hopefully the discussions tomorrow will help me to understand the changes taking place and maybe I can challenge some cultural leaders to find out what they think arts role is in the future and maybe this will help me to figure out what I need to do to ensure that I can financially continue to create work.
Who knows, tomorrow is another day.
