Something unusual has happened to me. I don’t want to do anything, and more significantly I DON’T CARE that I don’t want to do anything. Partner says it’s like I’ve returned from New York a different person. Even more strange, I don’t want to think or write about art, or look at any art, or watch tv programmes about art. I only get a tiny way through a thought about art and I just feel disinterested.
Is this what happens after a year or so of obsessive driven art-making, profile-building and questioning? I just had so much I wanted to do, that as soon as I got the ACE research funding I couldn’t come up for air. Now I’ve done everything I outlined in that funding bid.
At the beginning of the project I hardly dare wish that I would gain any recognition or exhibitions. Now I have had lots of ‘highs’ (inclusion in curators choice on Axis, successful installation in Coastival, a beautiful artists book, and inclusion in a really good show in New York no less). So how do I celebrate? I feel bored of all my ideas, don’t want to show any of my work any more.
Think I might go and clear out my studio- piles of bags and boxes from various projects are piled up everywhere.
ps. remembering to be positive despite the list-horrors –
I’m getting a bit of publicity on the back of the Mother/Mother mailout and my new artist book ‘What a Complete Waste of a Day’….
interview and image featured in ACE Yorkshire ebulletin ‘White roses in the Big Apple’
article in Huddersfield Examiner about APT NY
the book will be offered on a-n as either an AIR subscriber prize or a review prize for interface reviewers!
It’s easy to ‘not get round to’ doing the legwork with promoting yourself – but I’m glad I’ve put the hours in, because it’s growing!
I wonder how i’ll get on with the face-to-face networking and promotion in NY – selling myself is not my favourite thing by any stretch!
I have a list for everything. On every surface, in every pocket and bag. What happened to my usual satisfying process of merging and restructuring all the lists into a plan? I’m having a Frank Spencer moment. Only I don’t have a Betty. oh dear. what to do.
Here’s some publicity for the show in New York. It’ll be great once I’m there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/22/working-women-husbands-housework
‘Useless stay-at-home men’ a female myth
Working women who claim partners don’t pull their weight do so to feel more feminine and in charge in the home.
‘….Meisenbach said the trend of the female high achiever and the male slacker is a tall story that women tell each other to compensate for the fact that most career-orientated women feel an “overwhelming sense of guilt” over their role and less of a mother and a wife.’
Great. I feel so much better, safe in the knowledge that any injustice I experience can be explained by my insecurity about my role as a wife and mother. Splendid. now – what to do first, iron my hubby’s shirts, tidy the children’s book corner or earn some money.
Excerpts from my ‘Stock Exchange’ notes and thoughts;
I write a blog, an activity which has significantly raised the profile of ‘audience’ in my mind – people contact me with responses to my posts, or treat me with avaricious delight when they meet me, having read the blog. I used to be pleased and surprised that people had read it. Currently I’m unsettled about who has and hasn’t read it, and what assumptions they have made based on what they read. The blog has inhabited an ambiguous space between truth and invention. It’s a way of examining and subverting the private and public. The process of selecting, editing, enhancing stories to include is a creative one.
But now I am inhibited by an imagined audience of critics and experience anxiety about being discovered/outed by neighbours and parents at the school gate, who, until now have assumed that I’m the same as them, and only discover I’m not through reading the blog. I can easily imagine the response to this sort of self indulgent rambling… good Yorkshire straight speaking ‘bollocks’
