Of course it’s alright to date on a residency!
I have to keep reminding myself why I wanted to come here and that I arranged all this myself – I have no one else’s expectations to fulfil but my own. I’m getting nervous about going back to London next week. The installation with the solar panels is making me anxious – I wish that I’d got it up and running before I came away, but I didn’t and I can’t change that.
I’m also aware that my trip to London marks the halfway point of my time in Stockholm. So much has happened since I arrived it’s not really surprising that I feel unsettled. Last week’s presentation and the feedback I got reminded me that my life and my work (my art) are inseparable. Yesterday I read an obituary for Miko Cherry (well I translated excerpts of it from Swedish) and there was a sentence that I translated as “ her real art was her whole life”. This idea seems to be message that I need to hear – it keeps cropping up in different ways through the people that I’m meeting here. It’s something that I know and something that frightens me because it opens up so many possibilities … and has so much to do with integrity.
Hampus and I talked about what it meant to be an artist on our way back from visiting a friend (and ex-tutor of his from art school). We seemed to conclude that being artist might well be about how you lead your life, that being an artist is not restricted to having to produce what other people recognise as ‘art’. Of course producing what others recognise as ‘art’ is very seductive and can be very rewarding (in many senses of the word), but perhaps it is only one option.
I came here with an open mind … perhaps I feel open rather than ‘unsettled’ …
