Sometimes I worry I’m too happy a person to be a great artist… its usually fairly shortlived, and I’m quite happy (there I go again) being myself but I do love the work of often quite tortured souls.
What has triggered this is that I’m listening to Paula Rego pour forth as I sit and work in the studio. I find it useful listening to people talking whilst I’m working, somehow it gives my consciousness something to do to free up my subconscious to get busy with what I’m working on. She’s amazing but she does seem to remember the blackest memories from her childhood – suicide committing pet dogs, ‘playmate’ who wanted to cut her eyes out…(This is all on the Web of stories website – http://www.webofstories.com/play/17599?o=MS I select ‘play all’ and let it run on)
Last night there was something on the radio about ‘resilient’ brains, in reference to trying to understand depression and mental health issues. Most studies focus on people who get depressed, but the interesting thing is that although they think certain experiences in life can act as triggers to bring on depression, there are also people who can suffer the most awful things, but never get depressed – they now think there might be something about the set up and design (i.e. experience and genetics) of those people’s brains that make the particularly resilient and resistant to depression.
I tend to look on the bright side and tend to remember the happy things that have happened to me, I get on with things. I was just thinking about Rose Gibbs ‘Mountain’, and I get from it the sense that she is slightly disgusted and shocked by what she as a woman and her body have to go through, as it is a mountain of ‘stuff’ created by women menstruating, vomiting, leaking breast milk and being sick (actually not sure if there are any women vomiting but it would be in keeping). This mountain that seems to have been produced by the excretions of women’s suffering is growing a teaming multitude of little and medium and big penises, all flaccid and burgeoning. (I don’t think I’d ever do work like that myself, but in all its goriness and violence I love Rose’s piece, and I love Paula Rego dark and psychological worlds) I’m personally suffering myself at the moment as my body is now having its first cycle since giving birth 7 months ago and coupled to the fact that I’m being woken by 2 small children most nights I’ve developed terrible lower back pain (from sleeping in a toddler bed with a baby in my arms – very foolish!) and on Monday I thought I’d also contracted a stomach bug so looked like death. But somehow for me, I just get on, it doesn’t horrify or disgust me, I just kind of accept and move on. And it is never what I do my work about.
I also remember something I heard Polly (Bielecka – Pandolin London’s Gallery Director) say about my work in an interview or recording relating to the Women Make Sculpture show earlier this year: that I was at one end of the spectrum of the work where it might have been made by a man. Its strange I’d never thought of myself that way before. I wonder if it is because I can tend to work in quite an intellectual way? Strangely my recent work seems to have been influenced by my pregnancy earlier this year (a particularly female subject matter?), but I guess I have approached it in my own way, looking at the science of embryogenesis. What fascinates me is that moment of form and shape appearing from nothing, where the first set of cells form a disc and then develop symmetry, a direction then more and more complex structures align themselves along that proto body line. And I now have as my companions, the beautiful modernist abstract sculptures which to me are redolent with form and function.
At the end of the day, I’m quite happy being me and doing things the way I do them. Lets hope somehow out of all this work I can build a sustainable practice (hmm, currently trying to ignore money worries again).
