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 …
