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…
