I want to use this space to reflect on, and find my own balance between these three aspects in relation to my art practice. I make porcelain domestic objects and I seek to improve their technical detail and their meaning.
New directions
A part from the fact that my studio is frozen and unreachable with the snow, I am planning my next year of activity and I feel I need a change of strategy.
After a very promising 2009, in which Origin gave me a real boost, I find myself in the unexpected situation of having had all my applications for 2010 rejected. I have been excluded from CAL, Rufford, Potfest, Hatfield and Farnham, and I can’t apply for Ceramics in the City because it falls on a Jewish holiday!
It feels as if my wings have been cut before I could demonstrate I could fly.
I am at lost of ideas and I don’t know what to do next.
It is very strange, last year I felt lost with confidence and lonely in my studio, this year I am bursting with ideas, I am looking forward to better weather to get to work, but I risk making work and accumulate it unsold and unshown in boxes.
The only idea that comes to my mind is to go from gallery to gallery to promote myself but it feels a bit like begging.
I would like to have a personal exhibition, but I think it is a bit early to aim for that and I would not even know how to begin in organizing it.
I thought that by participating to shows soon or later galleries would notice me and eventually I would be invited to events and themed exhibitions, but evidently I have been naïve and something else needs to be invented.
We have to give the spare bedroom to my daughter because she is still sharing with her younger brother. I am happy to do so, but I also feel extremely jealous of the privacy of a room that I never had. I want to have a space for myself. I had to pack away all my art materials and art books from that room and store them in an unaccessible place. I feel a lump in my throat and I want to cry. This if affecting me in a deeper way than I can rationally explain. I feel my house is not mine, I have possession only of the kitchen but as the result i have no mental and physical space for making except my shed in the garden for ceramics. I need a studio in the house for my art books and materials to be out and in reach.
I was writing a post on the day the website was switched off for two hours and I lost my text. I can't remember at all what I was writing about, so many things have happened in these 10 days and life is quite different. My Mother in Law died suddenly and she was the first of her generation in our families to go, creating a big change in how we do things. We will miss her a lot especially the children and my husband for whom he was the ultimate sponsor and supporter in whatever he did. We have thought a lot about life and death in this week and came to think that actually she wanted to go she was not enjoying life for 10 years and the only source of happiness were our achievements and her husband's good health. We want our parents to stay the same we think they will always be there but we have to face their departure sooner or later and it is a big shock. we had a week if family cuddles and of being together and we feel we have already moved on, but this will be felt with sadness at every festival and celebration the first of which is in two weeks.
I am also stimulated to talk about my experience of parenting and working as an artist. My first consideration is that I was a mother for 11 years before I even thought of becoming an aristAll through university I tried to leave the college early in order to leave my children with a babysitter as little as possible and did all my essays late at night after they were asleep.
The choices I have made after graduation also respect the fact that my priority is the family: my studio is at home allowing me to save on commute time and to work every minute of spare time I have while the children are at school, or even snatching some short intervals during their tv time. I choose to show my work in events that are local to London or maximum 2 hours away so I don’t have to spend nights away from home and we have a motor home to go to Potfest or Rufford once a year as a family trip.
This arrangement suites me even if sometimes it brings isolation from the artist world and a strange feeling of living in two incommunicable worlds. I do fantasize about doing a residency abroad or renting a studio somewhere in London but I know that this could have been the route if I had started this as my first career.
It is often difficult to compare myself with many artists who are may be younger that me but have worked for 20 years and so much more accomplished, but then I realize that the happiness of my children and a strong and balanced family is definitely one of my achievements.
I have not written for many months, and things have progressed a lot.
A letter from Andrew Bryant yesterday encouraged me to post this piece I had prepared a month ago.
What happened was that I realized I needed help and first I went to a therapist for few months and I discovered with her help where some of my blocks and recurrent problems are .
I also had few sessions with a life coach who helped me to find targets for my practice. This was a much more practical input than the psychologist and with her help a lot of things have moved.
• I threw away all my seconds and I started making pieces only for myself: this brought the amazing discovery that if a cup is for me I know how I want it and it has to be perfect, so now I will keep only things that I would be happy with.
• I started to try new shapes and develop new ideas. To do this I decided to join a pottery class run by en ex Harrow colleague, just to have use of a different studio and a place to throw stoneware without contaminate my wheel. I find this liberating and I met another mother artist in a similar life stage and this friendship has given me the feeling of not being alone in the struggle.
• Making a new body of work gives me also enthusiasm to continue making my stock for the summer shows, and having paid for the studio place, I have to go every week to commit to the new work and perfect it.
• Reading books on the fear of creating and in particular Trust the process An artist’s guide to letting go by Shaun Mc Niff have helped me realize that the uncertainty I feel is normal that all artists feel lost and insecure during the work and often satisfied only for a very short time at the end of a work. Basically the uncertainty is the norm and the only way to proceed is to just doing it.
Ceramic artist in the fifth year of practice, trying to progress in the research of personal motivation and style.
