professional development

compress of ideas

attempts to speak my mind

posed questions and tweets sent

unconvientional blog post comprising of disjointed one line statements

crtitically attempting to be critical

ideas out waying ability to produce

awareness of a world and paralising blinding sight of what.

oh dear.

a wet Wednesday in October and the answers will not be coming anytime soon. recent memories of another risky project : taking an interactive installation to a theatrical scratch night. what part of me didn’t scream at the idea? i took part because i was invited to. i agreed on the basis of a model of the evening that didn’t repeat itself. i’m left asking myself “what do i need right now?”

personally i need to be gentle on myself.

professionally i need to make peace with all my ideas and ideals and be happy that this might leave me in a metaphorical village with one bus a day continuously on a figure of 8 journey.

i have to admit i’ve corted the thoughts of giving it all up. stopping. admitting that no one wants to see my work.

i make a cup of tea and sit in my new found world of not making, not expressing, not exploring, not playing. not allowing my mind to be curious. denying myself the doing of things that i enjoy to do.

and i remember the one person that really got and really enjoyed the work at the scratch night. 1 person in 40.

and i think why did i even think that 40 people would get what i do? i do some quick maths. 2.5% of the audience got my work. that’s under half of the percentage of the population of the uk that go to the tate ( 7% ) .

i sip tea.

i consider my preciousness.

i consider my sanity.

i consider my food bill.

i consider my self worth.

i slow down.

i sip my tea.

i write a long list.

i sip my tea.

(what personal complex do i harbour that needs what i do to make me whole? )

(what part of my making is therapeutic?)

(what part of my making is about me creating a world around me void of things i don’t like?)

how often do i back up? not very often actually as the laptop works so why do i need to back it up? i do back up the files that go to make the current in progress work. so what about all the stuff on the hard drive ?

i’ve asked the question this week as i have an opportunity to upgrade to the latest os to take advantage of the apps that a newly arrived piece of hardware will connect to.

i’ve looked over the contents of the hard disc and see that there are files going back to the inception of my relationship. how much hard disc space is used by all that? do i need it all? what to keep?

i was amazed to discover on the machine there is over 17gb of images. how many of those do i regularly use i thought.

time to slow down. time to edit the contents of the hard drive. time to make disc back ups and delete the originals. time to reflect on things done and to see that the future doesn’t have to have everything carried forward with me.

i am a natural horder. i have school books from my teenage years. boxes of them. boxes of files from my drama college days and my national youth theatre seasons, my weekly rep days too.

so why have i horded it all?

consciously i saw no reason to throw it all away.

subconsciously i believe hording to be connected to a sense of something missing. i believe this because of a television programme about horders attempting to let go of all that is horded. i am by no means at the level of keeping bags of rubbish. oh no i’m very adept at throwing the bags of rubbish away even to the point of going through the general rubbish bag removing the plastic and all things recyclable.

i wonder if the keeping of things has been to do with wanting to discover who i am. there being some point in time where i will be able to realise. how do i know if that time will come? is it an all the time event?

this sense of knowing who i am permeates it’s way into my online persona. well wanting to know who i am and how i communicate that comes into how i approach my online persona.

i’ve considered the relationship between my online self and my physical self. if i place something on line does it have less meaning than if if were a physical thing in a space that such physical things are looked at and admired for their meaning because of the actions placed upon it to get it there.

paradoxically i often think that i haven’t understood all the talk about a critical discussion within my practice. i grew up where a critical discussion was a close adult telling me what to do because i wasn’t doing it and i should. oh the joy to realise that critical discourse is just the ideas being talked about and being reflected upon.

so in freeing up space on the hard drive and placing the discs in a drawer, what process am i going through? well it appears that i’m doing something that has previously not been on the concious agenda. scale springs to mind now.

i am getting a pleasing feeling in burning each disc and having slowed down have the space to write something here. i am becoming a fan of slowing down.

i am also seeing the advantage of having a critical discourse at the centre of my practice. my view of it today is that i can communicate the boundaries to which comers to view will stand inside.

my current inability to state what the critical aspect of my practice is leaves the field wide open and consequently seems to offer too much range to be interesting.

so my challenge becomes how to find the boundaries that afford comers to the works to feel safe and still afford me the creative space to flit and explore and have fun?