Today I have been reading Deanna Petherbridge’s superb essay on Gill titled ‘Recouping Otherness’. She explains that, from the sparse facts of her life that we do know, Gill spent a long time in bed after a miscarriage and illness that claimed one eye. Although she probably ventured out of her bedroom to go to the shops to buy her postcards or art materials, for the large part Gill was isolated from the outside world.
There is no way I can possibly fully understand the traumas Gill suffered. The closest I have come to experiencing such seclusion was probably when, just after I completed my MA in drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, I contracted reactive arthritis. Bed ridden and unable to walk for just over two months, I felt trapped in my own little world. At one point I couldn’t even pick up a pencil without being in absolute agony and when I finally could the drawings I made sat in bed were quite different to what I was producing before I got ill.
Thankfully I made a 100% recovery but that period still effects me, even if it is more psychological than physical. Perhaps it is the reason I test myself with my mark making – the more intricate and ‘perfect’ I can make it, the more I have moved away from an illness that temporarily robbed my of all my technical skills as an artist.
This afternoon I actually attempted to make a drawing in bed. It was bloody hard work and not much fun! Perhaps it reminded me too much of what was a pretty traumatic period in my life. However, the biggest thing was that I just missed my studio.
When I was recovering from my illness one of the first things I decided to do was get a new studio. My confidence (both in terms of my practice but also generally) was at a real low and I knew that meeting a new studio group would help. I made new friends who encouraged me to ‘get back in the game’ as it were and have had various studios since, at one point travelling about 100 miles a day from the midlands to commute to Cor Blimey Arts.
I now see my studio at Bow Arts as an integral part of my identity, not just as an artist but as a person. I don’t think I will be having a ‘lie-in’ again soon…!
