If the artist can’t get to a studio…
…the studio must come to the artist.
It’s been a little over a year since that fateful week in May 2012 when my degree show coincided with the birth of my first child. The subsequent brain-fog that left me without an original thought in twelve months (not that I think the baby part makes me any different in terms of having a post-degree lull) has finally lifted and once again my idle thoughts have begun to descend, emerging as word documents on the old gaffer-taped laptop, and are at last beginning to form coherent ideas in the space between the ends of my fingertips and what should be a studio wall. Only there is no studio wall. There is no studio, nor is there likely to be one before the end of the year, so I have had to improvise one.
With a number of new text pieces to work on, but nowhere to try them out, I have taken an old piece of work, Some work (2012), and painted the back of it white, in the hope that it will serve as a temporary studio wall. As it happens it’s not that much smaller than the studio spaces I had at university anyway. I am writing this post between coats.
My practice has been shifted around slightly, in order to manage my creative urges in the absence of a studio space. Recent new work (some complete – some in progress) has been of the ‘cultural artefact’ kind – a found empty biro, a sight so rarely seen that I have museumified it. I also took the most common spelling correction I have seen on places like Facebook and YouTube – *you’re – and painted it in acrylic on MDF. That little asterisk is really making its presence felt in the digital age.
There are other projects too, but it’s time for another coat on my one-walled studio, and the excitement of being back in action is too much to concentrate on finishing this post.
