Around a week ago, I found myself wide awake at some unnumbered hour of the very early morning, exhausted, ill, badly jetlagged and at crisis point. The thoughts running through my mind at an uncontrollable rate can be summed up in a single sentence: “I don’t feel like an artist – but if I’m not an artist, what, and who, am I?”
During the following days, I considered this point deeply. I variously resolved to Renounce Art, to return to square one and devote myself to languages or history or literature (the subjects at which I excelled at school), to stop aspiring to anything more than being a housewife-and-mother type (a simple life, and wouldn’t I be happier if things were simpler?), or to simply grit my teeth and continue onward down the unhappy path I’d trodden for the past few years. None of these were particularly satisfactory solutions.
Though my first & most powerful instinct is always towards self-criticism, I began to think about whether the increasingly constrictive, homogenic nature of the visual arts “industry” as it marches further towards/into professionalism might be partially responsible for my sadness and my sense of unbelonging – and, slowly, the idea for this blog was born. Here, I want to interrogate the term “artist” and everything that surrounds it; to investigate what it actually means to self-identify in this way, to question the assumed benefits of a professionalised art – and, hopefully, to find my feet and my courage again in the process.
