Mirror, signal, manoeuvre

It’s now nearly a year since my last mentoring session and this will be my third blog post about the process. When I applied for a-n mentoring funding I was clear that I expected the process to cover a period of two years so, with half the money spent and half the time elapsed, I am kind of on track.

Despite this it feels as if I have let things drift, but I’ve learnt by now not to worry too much about what my feelings are saying and to try to keep a clear view of what is actually happening. The past year has been full on and a lot has happened in all my personal and professional lives.

I’ve just reread my first two blog posts about mentoring and they are quite vague and noncommittal. I’m not surprised by this because I don’t think you can really be expected to speak lucidly about a process when you are in it. Some people can and they enjoy going into the detail of the twists and turns of that process and perhaps the best blogs are ones which are written in that way. And in the past I’ve been of a mood to blog like that myself. But I’m not having that experience currently and I’ve decided that, instead of staying away and not posting anything (which would in any case be contrary to the terms of the a-n funding) I’ll just step up here and be honest about what’s going on.

So here goes: I don’t know what’s going on with my mentoring and I don’t know what to do next. But I’m not worried about that. I’ll be thinking about it over the next few weeks now that the teaching year has come to an end and I get a few months to think again. I’ll make some decisions and something will happen and then I’ll tell you about it.

Mentoring aside: you know when you’ve got an idea and you’re excited about it but you don’t want to say too much about it because if you do it will never happen? Well, that’s where I’m at right now. And, even in saying that I may have said too much…

Mirrors and Signals

Yesterday I enjoyed a day’s mentoring with Joanne Lee looking at my work in my studio and discussing the ideas at play. Preparing for the session over the past months has been a great learning experience in itself as I fetched out old pieces, unwrapped them from their packing, dusted them down and thought about how to display them.

Eventually I found myself amongst a sort of condensed retrospective of my work with so many pieces on show right up close to each other. It made my studio seem very small to have so much out at once and it was a curious experience to see how the works talked to each other – in the case of sound and video pieces literally – and to look for the connections and disjunctions.

In many ways the works themselves could be seen as ‘remnants’ of exhibitions which were quite occasion-specific at the time. It was also interesting to think about how these sculptural objects, in virtual and physical form relate to a practice that has had the social at its heart or has run concurrently with a working life of frequent community engagement.

In a sense this is the point of having mentoring discussions at this stage of my practice: to consider how ‘works’ relate to ‘work’ and to use that to understand better what my current concerns are and what I would like them to be.

It is too soon today to go into the detail of what Joanne and I talked about. I need to write some notes for myself and let the thoughts settle and see what arises out of that before I can articulate what they are. And once I have done so I will write another post here.

Thanks again to Jo for being such a generous and stimulating conversation partner and for going deep into matters, whilst also making me laugh like a drain.

I have called this blog ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ because I have been thinking about mentoring as an opportunity to look back, take stock of what I have done so far, take note of what is currently happening with my work and decide where to take it next.

Mirrors, like water, evoke reflection where the landscape happens again but in reverse or upside down. Getting a new view of my work is a definite aim of asking for mentoring: that in discussion with someone else about the work, insights I had been searching for will come to light.

I imagine spreading the process over up to two years so as to have plenty of time in between conversations to let the insights sink in and see where they take me next.

My first mentoring session was with Joanne Lee in May. She has given me a thought-provoking list of questions about my work which I could imagine forming the spine of the whole process.

My next step is to set up some pieces (those which still exist in material form) in my studio so that we can look at them together and talk about what is going on.

Joanne is thoughtful, challenging and supportive and I am really looking forward to us working together. A friend, Judith Alder, is also the recipient of a Re:view bursary and she and I are planning to meet up occasionally during the process to talk about how it is going.

I am very grateful to a-n for giving me this chance to make mentoring a reality rather than a fantasy. After a busy decade and a half of teaching and mad freelancing which included giving a lot of advice and support to other artists, it’s my turn now.

Which turning I take remains to be seen…