It’s nearly the end of a three-year process and various thoughts and feelings are buzzing around in my head. I never, ever, saw myself completing (or ever starting!) a degree in Fine Art, but here I am at 57 years of age having almost got to the end. The projects are completed, the essays are done and that initially fear-inducing dissertation is finished and shelved. I cannot believe that I really left my job and career, and enrolled on the course… It has never been like me to take such risks.
The thoughts and feelings I am experiencing leading up to our final show are interesting. There’s a sadness that the course is over, but mixed with more positive feelings of a sense of completion. The final show almost feels unnecessary now. The sense that it was everything the course was about has receded and now it just seems to be a marker of another ending. One of our technicians jokingly said yesterday, that I will soon be onto my way into the big outside world; it made me realise that for so many students this is the start of their adult lives. It’s a massive step for them and stangely I feel quite emotional for them. I think I have been so caught up in my ‘art-making’, that I hadn’t really thought that much about the fact that the young people around me had this massive step to take. I wish them the best, it can be pretty difficult out there at times!
With the turbulence of the final show and the end of the course, I am reminded of the advice given to me by a loving Buddhist teacher I met at the monastary I stayed in in my young twenties…. ‘This is just the way it is at the moment’. This advice would really annoy me at the time, but with a bit of time under my belt I can see the wisdom in this….. Whatevers going on for us all, however we would like it to be…… however we would like it not to be….. ‘This is the way it is at the moment!’
