This next post is the last of my ‘looking back and wondering why I do this stuff’ ones. I wrote it a few days ago. Understanding myself is my only reason to exist. Understanding all of you I will never be able to do, as it’s hard enough working-out ‘me’. Stepping back, with hindsight, I can see why I am here now, doing what I do – and why my Degree Show project is to be (ultimately) about death in many forms. I question death. I question endings. I question the life I’ve had. I question your lives. Here is that post; you don’t have to read it:-
I got myself another little job in the early 90s, and an even bigger studio in a mill by the beautiful River Blackwater – then set-up my own Youth Arts Workshop which gained Arts Council funding. I later responded to an ad in ‘Artists Newsletter’ for ‘an artist to live in a wing of a manor house’, thinking ‘I’ll never get that’. I did – and moved to said place where I lived and worked as an artist for over 2 years – exhibiting with some local ‘young luminaries’. I had another one of those little jobs – I was ‘head-hunted’ by an establishment to re-open the art day-services at a care home for people with learning difficulties.
I applied for an overseas position (in Germany) running art workshops and installing my artworks around a pretty town – I was chosen by the Germans from a shortlist … but that’s another story I won’t bother to tell.
Eventually, my day job became all-powerful, and I took on a bigger role. Creating my own art became less-and-less possible, as time disappeared. I quit after some time – and for a while drew pencil portraits on commission; then went on a Garden Design course – on which I gained a distinction. I thought I could create ‘contemporary fine art gardens’. Soon after starting to design a nice big one called ‘The Time Garden’, I slipped 5 discs and found it impossible. 18 months later, I had major spine surgery.
A while after that, I returned to working within the care industry – and went to study to become a psychiatric nurse – becoming a group worker running art & drama groups.
In the years leading up to attending UCS for this degree, I created a lot of new art – testing my abilities and finding out about my creative self all over again. Almost in a moment of madness, I decided to try to return to study art – and if I’m absolutely honest, it was entirely to network so I could find creative allies in this difficult world of ours. It’s worked, and I’m happy with that.
If sometimes I am a little edgy at having my art ‘marked’ – perhaps all of this will go some way to explaining why. No matter what, I will always be creative. It’s been a very long time since I worried about whether anyone else liked it. It’s my way to try out things that I feel like doing – I suppose that makes me a bit of an ‘outsider artist’; but I’m alright with that. I’m also on the inside too, now …
We are what we did.
6IX Souls is a project about all of the above.
That is why I have posted this.
You didn’t have to read it.
