I have resigned from my job in Enköping … and it feels, to be honest, both great and more than a little odd. I am going to miss running the actual workshops – spending time with the children, young people, and families that I have worked with over six, almost seven, years. I have had the pleasure and privilege of meeting fantastic, creative, challenging, inspiring, focussed, engaged, wonderful people of all ages. I am going to miss them … I already have since starting my sabbatical.
My ambition when I took the role (in 2017) was to run the kind of programme(s) that my young and early teenage self enjoyed and wanted more of. There was nothing for the odd and arty kids in my suburban hometown but there were art classes every Saturday at the technical college in a town not too far away. I loved those classes, I progressed from the ’junior’ to the ’senior’ class, and was delighted to meet some of those tutors when, a few years later, I did my art foundation course at the same college.
I really don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that art school saved my life – I acknowledged this many many years ago. Without that safe space in which I was able to define myself I truly doubt that I would be around today … and even if I was then I would be far less healthy and authentic. Perhaps that is why I was so invested in my work in Enköping, perhaps that is why I found the increasing restrictions so upsetting and so hard to work with.
Part of me (still) wants to continue and to fight for the creative … alternative … other … space that I managed to carve out and make available, but part of me realised that the frustrations and obstacles were out of proportion and that I was putting myself in too dangerous of a situation to carry on. The chasm between the me that ran the workshops and the me that had to deal with the bureaucratic and political inertia was becoming too vast for me to make the necessary leaps from side to side. I was in danger of falling into the abyss.
With distance I can see just how stressful I found the situation, and how I could not find a way to stop caring and ’just’ do what was possible. I could see the potential for truly great things to happen and I felt thwarted at every turn. The ’what was possible’ simply became too little for me to deliver with any sense of pride, integrity, or authenticity.
I am still finding my feet in my new job. It’s a different proposition but I hope that I bring the same commitment and enthusiasm to it … it’s still about opening up visual art … making it accessible … putting out there in people’s everyday lives, it’s just that this time I am working with objects rather than processes.
