October is always a good month for me. Don’t ask me why, even thinking about it might jinx it but somehow things seem to come together for me in October. I’m happy in the studio. I have built work up over the summer and it’s beginning to come together in a mildly satisfactory way. I started teaching and the workload at present is quite manageable, not great for the bank account but it’s certainly benefiting my own work. I have found there is no perfect balance where this is concerned.
The speech recognition program is behaving itself, and I’ve even managed to apply for a couple of opportunities. I struck a nice deal with someone who can provide me with a space to photograph work for free and couple of outlets who have agreed to provide free space in their kilns to fire work for the men from the homeless centre where I run workshops. I’m in such a completely different place than when I started my first blog on a-n.
I am so thankful for the part these blogs have played in my development. Not only do they hold a record of my practice developing from the moment I stepped back into the world of exhibiting after having my four children, they have given me a network of friends and like-minded people that have shared the struggle of creating along the way. As an artist based in a isolated, rural part of the country where other contemporary (for want of a better word) artists are thin on the ground, the blogs have become my group studio, providing the little snippets of conversation, sharing ideas and information in the same way that other artists would have popped their head around my door when I was part of a city group studio.
I don’t think it can be underestimated just what an effect this has had on opportunities for parents, dare I say particularly women, re-entering the arena of making art. At this point I feel that a-n has provided a safe haven, a nursery if you like, to test the waters and build up my confidence. The interaction with other artists through the blogs has rippled out as digital social communication has expanded. Things have progressed so quickly and now the thread from blogs is often responded to and continued on e-mail, Facebook, twitter and even a combination of all three. For anyone that is not yet proficient with these platforms I would recommend exploring them. Yes they are time consuming, but they do reap rewards as an opportunity has just arisen for me internationally through twitter contacts. I was sad to see Emily Speed wind down her blog somewhat but I can understand that perhaps there is a natural life to a lot of the blogs on this network.
My posts have become less frequent as my contacts have spread out from here onto other digital platforms. Like Emily I will keep my blog open and perhaps post now and then ( I don’t want to cut the apron ties just yet) but I feel ready now to explore an independent blog as other artists who appeared as fledgling bloggers on a-n have done. Back in the prairies of Nebraska in the early nineties, working on a residency there, the director called me to his computer and showed me how he could send a photo of his work across the world on something called the internet. Based on my own in an old clapperboard farmhouse with one dodgy telephone line to civilisation, I could never have imagined that life as a practicing artist would never be the same again.
