Keeping It Going

New year, new beginnings and a resolve to try and get to grips with the ‘stuff’ in my studio space – life stuff; stuff that I now feel ready to start sorting – properly sorting – by which, of course I mean sorting through the emotional impact that reacquainting myself with some of it might have. I’ve resigned myself to having a routine in place to process it all – it’s a huge task, both physically and emotionally and fellow Artists Talking artist/blogger Elena Thomas’ recent advice for help in moving on from feeling rather ‘stuck’ art-wise was this:

‘I’ve found that one foot in front of the other one at a time, and routine, seem to do the trick.’

I know Elena’s right, but I’ve hated and raged against routine for as long as I can remember, even though intellectually, I know it’s often what’s needed in order to get things done. It will be a year in February since I moved the bulk of my collections to the studio space I’m now in and I’ve oscillated between feeling quite exhilarated to utterly daunted by the thought of unpacking the boxes. I’ve had moments of sporadic, intense unpacking but the boxes’ contents have invariably ended up being neatly packed away again each time I’ve started any kind of sorting. I don’t seem to have been able to tolerate the mess and haven’t felt able to leave the stuff ‘all over the place’ without feeling that it might impact on me and I might start feeling a bit all over the place myself.

Maybe that’s what’s at the heart of it all, this past recent spell of inactivity – a fear that I will be all over the place emotionally and unable consequently, to focus on what I really want to do, which is essentially to create art. I’ve felt rather trapped by the boxes recently – acutely conscious of their existence by their sheer bulk and the room they take up in the studio and yet feeling unable to get to grips with them in any shape or form – they’ve started to feel like a bit of a burden.

Stuart Mayes left a comment on my blog this past week:

‘Your most recent posts have made me wonder about how tricky it is to maintain the balance between the sensitivity we need to make the art we make and the resilience we need to make the art we make.’

I agree – the balance is a tricky one. If you’re opening yourself up emotionally for the sake of your art, then you’re laying yourself wide open – and you’re vulnerable. We return to that eternal question of how much to reveal versus how much to conceal; a degree of resilience is needed in order to survive any amount of self – revelation.

I’ve said it so often here – but timing to me, is everything. Last summer felt exactly like the right time for me to donate a book to ‘The Museum of Broken Relationships’ when it visited London. When it came to it, it was an easy and straightforward gesture of letting go; I’d confronted, processed and moved on from the emotional attachment I’d made to the book and was happy and ready to see it go. And given that an integral part of my practice is based around the themes of value and worth, it feels like a particularly apt resting place for the book.

And so – in terms of timing for now, I’m ready for this new challenge and conscious of being on the cusp of what feels like a momentous task. It feels a little daunting, particularly when I think about how I’ll be working against the flow of what comes naturally to me through an instinctive and intuitive approach. But I’ve increasingly felt the need to take stock recently; I’m going to be taking a more scientific approach – logging, recording, documenting. Change can be creative and I’m starting the project with optimism and hope that I’ll be able to put to one side my fears and anxieties around revealing too much about myself. Time to take Elena’s advice and to take that first step.

Twelfth night’s been and gone, time for the decorations to be taken down and stored away for another year – a familiar activity for me, this packing up and storing away business. Just been catching up with other’s blogs and was struck by Rodney Dee’s writing on containment in his blog, ‘Art as Therapy.’ The quotes he uses from Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytical theory on containment truly resonate with me. I often mention the boxes in my studios as containers of emotions and one of my aims for this year is to make time to open them up and reacquaint myself with what’s inside them.

I’m conscious of what this might mean in terms of revisiting a lot of the feelings I’ve managed to keep under wraps for some time and on the basis of the ‘this time last year’ mentality that’s currently around, I’m intrigued as to how 2013 might unfold. Curious, too about how I might choose to record the whole unravelling process of my lifetime collections now that I feel ready to take it on. Will I write about it – here, on Artists Talking? Photograph it? Film it, perhaps? Is the anticipation of what I might find in the boxes greater than what I actually will? Will I be over or under whelmed by what I find? How will I best present them? And – that ongoing dilemma of mine – what will I want to keep and what will I be prepared to let go?

More than at any other point, packing away the Christmas things makes me acutely conscious of the passage of time – nostalgic for days gone by, thoughts about who is and is no longer here, in every sense of the word. Many memories are reflected in the various decorations – the passing of the years and the ageing process, things that however hard we might try, we simply can’t deny. The ‘Stop Here Santa’ sign has already become redundant and the musical crib hardly wound up and played this Christmas – my sons have grown older, as indeed we all have.

The rituals, the traditions – all useful in terms of helping us acknowledge where we are at any given points in our lives – what we’ve achieved and what we might like to achieve. Where am I, in relation to this blog, in terms of my creative work? An artist I respect and admire asked me recently about my work – how had ‘it developed ‘ he asked. And ‘How is it functioning now?’ Adding: ‘This is always an important question, I think. How a practice functions?’

It’s only recently that I’ve started to look at my work in this way – one of the many advantages of becoming a part of a wider and wonderfully diverse community of artists. There’s nothing like ongoing conversations with others who are actively participating in what’s going on in contemporary art to help you find your own place within it.

Much of December proved to be a difficult month for me creatively. I’m still thinking around the whole question of the extent to which my state of mind affects my creative output. For now at least, I’m already feeling decidedly more optimistic. I have some opportunities to show my work already confirmed for 2013 – a new position for me to be in so early on in the year – and I’m starting 2013 feeling like I have a better understanding of how I actually do function as an artist. Maintaining this blog has helped tremendously in giving me an overall picture of that. If someone were to ask what my work’s about, this blog would be one of the first places I’d direct them to, because if not about the actual process and production of the work itself, what I write does at least provide some insight, I think into the kind of artist I am. Someone recently described me as an ’emotional’ artist – more about that next time …

Keeping. It. Going. With regards to the title of this blog, ‘Keeping It Going’ hasn’t felt easy this past month or so. Keeping anything much at all going has proved difficult, in fact and I did very little throughout the month of December in terms of posting on this blog or producing any new work. It’s felt like a rather barren time creatively and emotionally, I’ve been feeling a bit frazzled – the two often go hand in hand, I’ve realised. An unexpected funeral to attend, health affected by the horrendous flu bug that’s been doing the rounds, alongside the general mayhem around the Christmas period, it’s been very much a case of best laid plans going ‘aft agley’ as I quoted in my original blog ‘Keeping It Together.’

It’s a time for reflection all round, resolutions to be made (and broken!) and traditionally, the time of year to throw out the old and bring in the new. I’m in Edinburgh again for Hogmanay, celebrating all that I love about this beautiful city, allowing myself lots of rest in between. Time for recovery and relaxation has meant having the chance to take stock of the past year and I’ve been catching up with what I wrote this time last year in my ‘Keeping It Together’ blog. This extract from last year’s New Year blog post feels equally as relevant to me for the start of 2013.

I’ve also made a decision to start the year of 2012 as ‘free’ as I possibly can; positive, hopeful and in honour of my dear Dad, seeing and expecting only the best in people. ‘Free’ is a word my late Father used to describe those with open, easygoing and friendly dispositions – principled, positive, non-judgmental people with an interest in others. It’s a term I’ve always loved and being in Scotland again, amongst its lovely, warm people has reminded me exactly what it means.

The premise of this blog is to see if I’m able to maintain the writing of it at the same time as continuing to be active and creative in the studio. As with so much in life, it’s a question of finding the right balance. While I accept more readily now that the blog writing is an integral part of my creative output, I’m keen not to let the writing about the work take over the actual getting down to making it. I sometimes feel like there’s a danger of that happening.

I still have moments of feeling a real need to get to the heart of what’s in the boxes stored in my studio. That urgent feeling of course has as much to do with wanting to deal with and put to rest some of the associative emotions, as well as the actual physical raw materials – the ‘stuff.’ The simple truth though is, that however ‘contained’ the feelings might appear in the sealed up boxes, they stay around – they just don’t go away; it’s basic psychology. Timing in dealing with it all is everything, both in its physical and emotional sense.

As I’ve said before, a lot of emotions are tied up in the boxes in which my collections are currently stored and a certain amount of emotional robustness is required to process them and incorporate them into my work. And time in its physical sense is of course required to ensure the boxes don’t remain forever sealed and that they are opened up. It means making the time to make it happen – the sifting and the sorting, what goes and what stays – the de-cluttering to a large extent of a lifetime of accumulated possessions.

Out with the old and in with the new is highly pertinent to my creative work and what I do as an artist. Sadly, it seems, people feature in this clearing out process, too. I’m sentimental at heart but the older I get, the less tolerant I am of insincerity. I’ve grown tired of people paying lip-service to being generous and full of integrity while in reality, back-stabbing and acting in mean-spirited ways. My Dad left a sound legacy in being a principled, honourable person – it’s something I aspire to, at the very least.

And so, with these thoughts in mind, time to look forward to a brand New Year. You never know what’s round the corner. 2013. What will it bring?

If you’ve been following this blog, you might like to read this newly published interview in which I talk in more depth to artist Jane Boyer about many of the issues surrounding my work. Jane is curator of the forthcoming exhibition ‘This Me Of Mine’ and a fellow Artists Talking blogger.

http://thismeofmine.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/what-…

Being told by my own Mother how she had described me to someone as the daughter who ‘doesn’t work’ stirred up some strong feelings in me. I was quite gobsmacked by what she said. On reflection, I think it got to me for two reasons – firstly, because I felt it to be hugely unjust and secondly, because it undoubtedly fed into my own guilt and insecurities about whether or not the work I do as an artist constitutes work – real ‘proper’ work, I mean.

I’ve thought about my Mum’s comment a lot since she made it and I’ve come to see it in context. My Mum is a woman in her eighties, after all; the eldest daughter of four male siblings, who simply by being born female was the one expected to do the domestic chores while they did none; someone who lived through an era when being busily immersed in domestic chores was the expectation of a ‘good’ woman. So why would she think that a day of being in an artist’s studio could ever equate with the kind of working day she herself had witnessed and experienced?

My Mum grew up amongst a family of farm and building labourers and then went onto marry my Dad, moving with him to his native mining village in Ayrshire, Scotland. It was there that she witnessed real, hard graft amidst the miners working in dangerous conditions. That in her mind (and if I’m honest, in my mind too!) is what constitutes a hard day’s work. And when my siblings and I were older, she herself worked full time, caring for the elderly – again, a hands-on job involving a degree of physical labour.

So why would I expect her to have any idea about the amount of time I invest in being a practising artist? To consider the time I spend in the studio alone as legitimate work – in any shape or form? I haven’t exactly been arriving at her house sweating from hard labour!

The fact that I don’t have a regular income, I’m sure affects the way my Mum thinks about what I do. It affects me, too. I’ve moved from being financially independent for a number of years to earning occasional bits of money from selling the odd piece of work and being paid for a few talks I’ve given. I don’t however, earn anything near what you would describe as a regular salary. And yet, in my head, I feel very much like an employed person and, albeit for very little remuneration, I consider myself to be someone who works.

I’m fortunate enough to live with and share the income of my partner, a freelance writer, someone who very much understands the nature of the work I do. Applying myself to a creative practice has been all about starting a new chapter in my life and in my moments of self doubt (and they’re frequent!) he’s fond of telling me: ‘but you ARE earning – just not yet!’ He’s basing that on what his own experience has been – starting out in freelance writing, earning infrequently at the start but gradually building up a solid body of work and a sound reputation, enabling him eventually to make a good enough living from his writing. My working life as an artist won’t necessarily turn out the same way, but while there’s hope and an opportunity to try it…

When we started a family together, we made a joint decision that his career would be prioritised and that I would be the primary child-carer while our twin sons were growing up. As our sons have grown older and increasingly independent, so I’ve been able to spend more time applying myself to being an artist. Though my partner’s always been happy with this arrangement, I still find myself, despite all the reassurances, often feeling guilty about not earning a wage – it’s what I’ve always done, so why not now? And this is why of course my Mum’s words got under my skin and tapped into the guilt and self-questioning I sometimes experience about no longer being in ‘proper’ employment, with all the attached security it can bring.