Keeping It Together

It’s Burns Night and my thoughts are turning again to Robbie Burn’s poem, ‘To A Mouse.’ It’s one of my favourites and I’ve quoted it here before because of its uncanny relevance to what’s been happening in my life. The poem describes how a mouse, having made its plans for the winter, suddenly finds its nest destroyed by a plough. The best laid plans of mice and artists do indeed go ‘aft agley’. Not just a studio in my case but, as I wrote about in my last entry, a sketchbook too.

I’m still a bit surprised by how much the disappearance of my sketchbook unsettled me. It all feels a bit trivial in comparison to the very real issues I had to deal with in my past employment – life and death situations in some cases. Responses from fellow bloggers Elena Thomas and Stuart Mayes, artists/collectors themselves, however showed true empathy and a real understanding of how it feels to lose something precious. They made me feel okay about having such a strong reaction and prompted me to think a bit more about my attachment to the things I own. After all, by making a decision to retain something, I’m committing myself to looking after it and being responsible for it. I need to care enough about it to want to take on that responsibility, hence an immediate bond is formed.

I miss having my things around me! They are what define me as an artist – and indeed a person. They contribute towards helping me feel in control of my life; they also crucially provide the raw material for my creative practice. Given that the studio was the space where so much of that emotional processing went on, I’m starting to get a more keen understanding of the true impact of not having had such a space over the past three months or so. It was a place which allowed me the necessary head space to process a lot of the emotions associated with my collections of assorted people’s lifetimes, my own included.

There’s been some good news about the new studios I’ve been hoping for – they’re very near to completion and a small group of us from the former gallery space are all looking forward to being re-united. This is largely thanks to the dynamic duo Rosalind Davis & Annabel Tilley, the founders of ZeitgeistAP an artist collaboration, who essentially get things done. By the end of February at the latest, I hope to be in a new studio – more spacious than the last – and reconnected on so many different levels with my things. There might even be enough space for me to have all my scattered possessions in one place, probably for the first time ever. That really would be Keeping It Together.

I’ll raise a glass to that – and have another read of that wonderful poem…

To A Mouse

I started this blog when I lost my studio but this week I have been feeling the loss of something else. The book I applied for from New York City as part of the Sketchbook Project is nowhere to be be seen and I’ve had to accept that it’s not going to turn up.

At the start of last year during a quiet period I felt I needed something tangible to work on and weighed up the pros and cons of shelling out money to take part in the Sketchbook Project. I decided to go for it, spurred on by the fact that two beloved friends in Chicago could share in it by visiting and viewing my book as it toured the States.

After an initial burst of activity, the sketch book got put to one side. But when I was suddenly studio-less, I found it became a source of comfort to me. It was something I could work on around the kitchen table after all, and having it helped me focus my thoughts away from the studio situation and towards continuing to produce art.

I rarely work on paper so this was an experiment for me in many ways but once I started, I soon got into making my own mark on it through text, drawing and collage. The work felt different and challenging and (technical and drawing abilities aside!) I was looking forward to it growing into something quite personal and special.

I still had a long way to go with it, but the loss has upset me – partly because it means I won’t get the chance to complete it and partly because some precious vintage magazine cuttings were lost inside it. These had been collected and stored for many years waiting for just the right moment to use them – all gone! Will I ever see them again, I wonder?

I’m just not in the habit of losing things – not on a long term basis, anyway – and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised that the loss of the sketch book is a casualty of not having a studio. My working materials and personal collections are generally very well looked after, ordered and controlled. However chaotic things might appear on the surface in my studio, I always have a keen sense of where things are. The sketch book would ordinarily have stayed in the studio, its precise location known.

I now realise that the act of Keeping It Together applies as much to the materials I use for my work as it does to my state of mind. The loss of the sketch book has ultimately been about not keeping it together and so, just as I’ve felt ‘all over the place’ in my head at times, so too have my working materials been, quite literally, all over the place.

It’s becoming clear to me that having a studio means much more to me than just the physical space. As well as being a place to house my vast collection of stuff, there’s something that happens for me in the studio that goes far beyond this. A studio anchors me, effectively containing the feelings and emotions associated with digging up the past and unravelling a lifetime of memories and all the associated paraphernalia that goes with them. My collections are not so much about what I collect as they are about how they define me – the sifting, the sorting, the placing is an integral part of the whole process and my relationship with the things I’ve collected over so many years is an intimate one.

Small wonder then that I haven’t created anything of significance in the past two weeks or so, because if truth be told, however positive a spin I try to put on it, without my things around me, I too have been feeling quite lost.

Now that I’ve really got into the swing of writing this blog, it’s quickly established itself as a positive, integral part of my work as an artist and I’ve been wondering how and why it took me so long to find the nerve to start it. Attending two recent events organised by Artists Talking undoubtedly had an impact on me; there was something about meeting experienced artist/bloggers face to face and hearing them speak so positively about the advantages of blog writing that helped make the whole process appear more tangible and appealing. And the modest and unassuming ways of the chosen speakers added to the overall feeling that blog writing was accessible to anyone willing to give it a go.

But other reasons for feeling able to take the plunge and start writing were due to what I’ve recognised as a shift in my own learning and personal development – an increase in confidence, essentially and a greater self-awareness. More recently, I’ve managed to overcome an innate shyness and to resolve within myself the unsettling feeling associated with appearing immodest and self-indulgent. Growing up in rural England in the 1960s, the daughter of working class parents, the inherent sense of knowing my place in society has to some extent stayed with me. Whilst being encouraged to celebrate the good things in life, there was a sense that any sort of blowing one’s own trumpet or bragging wasn’t welcomed and modesty was seen very much as a virtue. As a working class girl in those times, finding a husband and starting a family was expected to be the height of your ambition.

I made a conscious decision at the start of 2011 to gain more exposure for my art and proposed to use social networking to do so. But while understanding on an intellectual level that self-promotion was necessary in terms of getting my work seen, emotionally, I’d often find myself shying away from it. I would wholeheartedly champion my art work one day, tweet away to my heart’s content about it, only to retreat back into a silenced embarrassment the next. Self doubt? Lack of confidence? Good old fashioned British reserve? Or perhaps an underlying feeling that it really wasn’t my place, particularly as a woman, to promote myself?

I’ve been amazed by how in a very short space of time, writing the blog has helped sharpen my focus – how much it invites in, both from others in terms of their readership and comments, and in relation to myself, in terms of reflective thinking. I’m already beginning to feel accountable to others; and through ‘speaking’ out loud about my work and committing myself to certain things, I now feel like I want to come up with the goods; it’s a useful discipline and in the absence of a studio, I’ve welcomed having it.

My reticence about self-promotion has meant that stepping into the art world has unfolded at a measured pace; frustrating on one level but this slow-but-sure approach has produced something strong and my sense of who I am as an artist (both in a local and global sense) feels solid and sustainable. Meeting like-minded people through my move to Core Gallery last summer, holding on to some of the relationships formed there and then starting this blog has propelled me forward on all sorts of levels and I’m heading into 2012 feeling adventurous and optimistic.

Right now however, there’s a lot of displacement activity going on. I’m thinking about the mechanics of the blog a lot – too much I fear – how and why I’m writing it, why it took so long to get around to doing and so on, is all taking precedence over the actual process of getting down to any art work.

The sketch book I’ve been working on has, as of today, gone from being mislaid to seriously lost and I’m wondering if on some subconscious level, I’ve helped it happen. There are a lot of pages to fill and if I’m going to get it posted back to the States by the required date of January 30^th I’ve got a lot of work to do…

Days can go by sometimes without there being much of real significance in the news. This week has been different; January 3^rd 2012 was a momentous day for the British legal system and I can’t not acknowledge it here; after an eighteen year struggle by his family, the summing up of the Stephen Lawrence case has finally seen two people convicted of his murder – some justice at last for the Lawrence family.

This welcome news came after a spate of bad news stories. In the car on my way home on Tuesday – a news bulletin, shocking as it came through on the radio – reported, one after the other, various fatal stabbings and shootings that had taken place over the Christmas period. The perpetrators according to reports ranged from unassuming, ‘quiet’ people to those who had been exposed to a lifetime of violence. One of the incidents had happened on the street – a random act of violence against an innocent student who’d simply been in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ – but the majority had happened in domestic situations.

Ironically, I’d been at the Easter Road football stadium with my family just the day before where the issue of domestic violence had been highlighted. A huge white ribbon was carried onto the pitch by one of the players before the match started and all of them wore a white ribbon during it to show their support in addressing the crime of domestic abuse. I read a report recently that revealed that figures for victims of domestic violence had soared, up by some 35% during the recession of 2011.

I can’t separate any of this from my life as a practising artist – for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt socially engaged and what’s happening in the world around me still touches me and affects my day to day existence. I’ve had some time to reflect on this since losing my studio and it’s been invaluable in firming up my beliefs and intentions for the future. October 31^st 2011, the day I lost my studio space, was a defining day for me; it was when I realised just how integral my role as an artist had become to my daily life. And buoyed up by the support of others, I realised that I wasn’t going to discard a lifelong collection and I wasn’t going to abandon my vocation as an artist. I felt that I was no longer playing at being an artist – I felt like I was one.

A lot of what I’ve written about on this blog so far has centred around people and relationships; they have been a key part of 2011 and in 2012 I’d love to be able to strengthen the connections I’ve made with some of the artists I’ve met; not only are they people who have social consciences and share similar values to my own, but they are people who have encouraged me and complimented my work, instilling in me the confidence to keep on doing what I do.

But as well as nurturing and maintaining relationships, I also want to just get on with making some work – this blog’s contained a significant lack of discussion about any actual work for some weeks now, I’ve noticed and I’d like to feel that I’ll be able to address the balance of the two in the year ahead. I’m hoping it will all start to fall into place once I’ve allowed myself a bit of time to settle into the new studio space. That’s something I’m really looking forward to; the holidays are over – my sons started back at school today, made all the more poignant as I think of Doreen Lawrence’s loss. In terms of Keeping It Together, there can be no finer inspiration than her.

I’m in Scotland and being reminded all over again about how great it is to be here for this festive time of year. The Christmas trees and lights almost invariably stay up until Twelfth night and there’s not that sense of urgency to get everything back to normal that’s so often around in London. There’s the big build up to Hogmanay and New Years Day and a true sense that Christmas week is by no means over, that something exciting is yet to happen.

The sense of anticipation and continuing celebrations with family and friends slows the pace of life down considerably; it feels like there’s time to ‘just be.’ Long walks in vast open landscapes, both in the country and by the sea have been good for the soul and there’s nothing like seeing the wide stretches of horizon for helping to keep things in perspective. The weather here is also a constant reminder that we can’t control everything – we’re at its mercy and we can’t take everything for granted.

Bringing in the New Year and throwing out the old throws up all sorts of questions about life style choices. In the spirit of continuing with the theme of this blog, I’m thinking a lot about what I want to keep from this past year and what I’d like to get rid of – how best to ‘keep it together.’ In a recent blog I wrote about my ‘survival’ being as much about ‘keeping together the community of artists to which I feel I belong as it is about keeping myself and my creative practise together.’

I’ve made a decision to move to a new studio space as soon as it’s ready in the New Year. People who are key to my life as an artist are going to be there, too and I’m feeling positive about thriving in what I anticipate will be a trusting and nourishing environment.

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.