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.
