There’s been a bit of a gap between this and my last post, in part because I’ve been moving around a bit (re. where I’m living/staying). When I tell someone I’m currently an artist-in-residence they tend to imagine that I’m resident in terms of living on site; of course my “residence” is actually purely work related. So far in my career I’ve been an a.i.r five times in five very different locations, including a forest and two private schools; only once did the position involve/include living accommodation and that was through a rather tenuous connection! This occasion is similar, The Muse Gallery doesn’t have on site accommodation for its a.i.r’s. Instead the opportunity proffers studio and exhibition space in the heart of London. But this arrangement does add to the slightly disparate feeling of the end result in this case for me.
We a.i.r’s are four in number, working part/full-time simultaneously to pay London rents, else living further away in my case (outside London); making the opportunity to access the studio daily actually untenable. It would be nice to be benefiting from the feeling of working alongside each other but rarely are we in the gallery together. I, for one, am trying to get around geography (that is, because my home is a 6 hour round journey from Portobello road, in Sussex) by house-sitting in London, as and when the work is available. I get a lot of work done wherever I’m temporarily calling home but then I must move on. In my last post I spoke of the advantages of preserving an aspect of ones productive time without being observed, so spending time working off site has its advantages but I am torn, because a residence that actually came with a residence would be novelty.
Last night on the radio I heard Andrew Motion speak of his time as Poet Laureate. He was asked about the challenges as well as the advantages and he spoke of the trouble the creative soul has in respect of reigning in inspiration, so that it might be employed specifically when requested/on demand. He said that though some people find it easier than others to write to commission this was actually an aspect of the laureateship he found more difficult than easy. “There is something in the nature of poetry,” he said, “that intrinsically doesn’t like being told what to do”.
I’ve found the mental challenge he described similarly, in relation to previous residencies I’ve undertaken. In those instances mostly my work was confined only to the space provided. That is, I didn’t have a working/studio space separate to the space provided at the residency location but also the nature of my work at the time meant I was bound much more tightly to needing an orthodox studio space than I am now. To pick up and put down ones creative work between prescribed moments, such as when a school bell rings for example, is potentially counter-intuitive. To channel that work away from other moments when it appears capable of flowing freely can be a source of great frustration. Having people watch you at work, even if actually they’re doing little more than taking in the fact that you’re there, can also serve to stultify, through self- awareness, the flow of ones thinking. The creative process is naturally a process of frequent losses as well as (hopefully) recurrent moments of recognition and gain. Worrying about being seen going “wrong,” perhaps even needing to begin a piece again, can be petrifying in the true sense of the word. That is, it can make you, and the process rigid. It takes a significant amount of courage to recognise/admit the need to destroy something in order to rebuild it better, even when you’re alone, just you and the piece.
Even despite prior knowledge of this, being the type of artist whose proclivity is toward being private and whose thinking flourishes naturally best when the world around is still, I remain dismayed by how my confidence can lapse in public. These last couple of weeks I’ve been finding this less of an issue because my time has been spent necessarily more regularly off site than at The Muse. Nevertheless with others employed similarly (we artists-in-residence artists’ are 4 in number) plus, given that the work I do in situ remains there whilst I’m away from it I need regularly to remind myself to relax and soften my own perceptions.
In his interview Andrew Motion went on quote Emily Dickinson who said: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” He confirmed that, in respect of poetry, the best writing often results from having come to a subject via the back door or a side window whilst the pressure of commissioned work involves telling things straight forwardly. This issue I’m aware of also beyond the residency itself, in terms of needing to balance the need to think long-term and to try to develop new work that might be more “commercial” against the chance this year gives me to be experimental. Certainly no less for visual artists as for writers does Dickinson’s quote remain true.
Travelling into the gallery on the train the other day I was listening to an interview on the radio regarding mothers and daughters and their comparative fashion choices. Though I might have expected to be told that daughters commonly rebel against the particular style adopted by their mothers this programme seemed to conclude that mothers have a large amount of ongoing influence, even if it manifests subconsciously. It seemed to add weight to my thinking regarding the ways in which we “wear” our influences more broadly. That is, the ways in which all of the impressions we gain every day pattern/influence/colour us, almost as if they were drawn/scrawled all over us.
A couple of weeks have gone past since my last post. In that time I’ve finally gotten my head around and chosen from my designs, the specific paper garment pieces + the elongated sketchbook work I mean to produce. It’s taken some time, far longer than I would have predicted, to get to this stage. Though I’d believed I’d make a range of garments and one or more scroll works I’ve just not been able to pin down my starting point, amidst rather too many/diverse possibilities, until now. Phew! What a relief, now that I have the first piece in mind, the rest have fallen into place around/behind it. Now I just need to get on with production! Of course in the mean time I’ve been continuing to draw (portraits) and the development of the active side of things, in relation to the specifics of each piece, is an ongoing process I’ve realised will/must neccessarily be less well defined at the start.
I believe you really can’t control and/or predict everything about the dynamics even of a particular piece, let alone about your over all artistic development, at the get go, it just doesn’t work like that. It is, instead, an organic process with a life of its own; a fact that’s more than a little daunting at times, thrilling at others. Really you can only hope to learn to tame the wilder excesses of the dynamic between your will/objective understanding of what you think you’re trying to achieve and the wishes of each piece itself, as you come to know it. Hopefully sufficiently that is, as to be able to be productive (even innovative) rather than merely chaotic and potentially self-destructive. The length of time this process is taking as regards each individual piece however, is an endless source of surprise, and faint alarm!
It’s challenging working as a resident artist, that is, because the space you’re working in proffers an immediate audience. It’s challenging feeling you haven’t got enough actually done in a day, produced that is, when you know how important it is to also engage with visitors. It’s also challenging when those visitors directly challenge your work. This week I had a long conversation with a local man who told me I had a long way to go in getting across the notion that the individual, ephemeral psyche is worn like a garment. After I’d had a chance to talk him through the thinking informing my work he seemed to see it in a very different light but on initial glance he hadn’t realised anything approximate to my aims and objectives for it. That wouldn’t matter necessarily if he’d gleaned something similarly attractive (or perhaps repulsive even) but his interest had been minor until that point and so today I left the studio questioning, profoundly. Of course there’ve been others who’ve been much more immediately positive but it’s funny how certain voices ring louder in one’s head.
