What does it mean to be an artist?

Sleepless last night, and thinking hard, the way I tend to do when I am pinned to the bed by exhaustion. (A sort of captive audience for my mind!) It occurred to me that there is something very sad and personal at the heart of all my working and my thinking; that no matter how much I might believe that I am making something outward-facing, really it is quite the opposite; the signposts point, obliquely, inward. This does tie in with a lot of my beliefs about subjective reality, everything seen through the prism of the Self, but I was surprised by the extent of this inwardness, when I considered it fully.

The truth is, I’ve had some bad luck, and I do have difficulties, and there have been bad things; there are a lot of ghosts around me, a lot of things that haunt me. And I’ve never really felt able to talk about these things, having always been (well, since adolescence) the sort of person who prefers to exist just outside of the spotlight, in that halflit, shadowed space. (This is a reason why I am so uncomfortable with “networking”.) I’m too solitary/private to deal well with attention, & for this reason counselling & talking with friends has never been for me, despite attempts. (I’m yet to try psychoanalysis.) But when you carry things that haunt you, & when you are, somehow, in spite of yourself, an expressive person, I suppose it is only natural that these things will seek an outlet. But I do not want my work to become a form of therapy; I loathe the idea of being so self-referential, self-pitying, self-focused. I do not want to become literal, obvious. I do not want to play the part of the Tortured Artist. It’s about transcending the self, not pandering to it! What I want to do is to try to resolve (or at least explore) these tensions between Self and Other (aether); and, at the same time, to allow the knots and lumps inside me to slowly unravel, loosen and expand.

I wonder if it is the same for everyone; this struggle to be expressive & heuristic in one’s work – without feeling self-indulgent or crass? For myself, I am not at all sure that I can escape nor erase this one fundamental four-letter word that sits at the heart of everything I do; everything I am. At times like this, I feel I’d really benefit from an older friend or mentor – a parent (or elder sibling)-like figure who could share the benefits of their experience with me. My 20s have been a strange voyage, blown in all directions; & I feel that slowly out of the fog, a solid shape is emerging, and that shape is who, or what, i am; in short, they’ve been a gradual process of coming to know & understand myself – but mostly I feel adrift, unanchored, lost in the fog. To have a guide would be a wonderful, wonderful thing.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote here – almost a month! It’s been an extraordinarily rich month, too, which found me stumbling upon so many enlightening & revelatory things, & wishing that I’d had time to blog about them. It’s Biennial time here in Liverpool, & I’ve seen some wonderful work: Eva Kot’atkova & Nina Canell at the Tate; Sachiko Abe at A Foundation. In Kot’atkova, I found a definitive example of how “community engagement” (that dread buzzword!) can be a valuable and active element of an artwork; the artist’s drawings, mini-sculptures, installations and sketchbooks integrated perfectly with the work she’d done with local schoolchildren, and the whole project, with its many facets and approaches, became an installation in its own right, housed in a hexagon-like, partitioned structure in the centre of the gallery.

Sachiko Abe’s paper-cutting performance (accompanied by a series of intricate, pattern-like drawings) is precisely the sort of thing I love: meditative, unassuming, simple; quietly physical and very elegant. The artist sits, perched birdlike in a sort of eyrie, slowly cutting strips of paper; the space is silent but for the sound of her scissors breaking the fibres. A trail of cut paper leads downward & outward, across the floor; then rises up in a great column, fountain-like. It stands opposite the great brick furnace (A Foundation inhabits a former knifeworks), & mirrors it perfectly; the product of an ephemeral sort of industry.

Canell’s work moved me incredibly. Housed in a small, blue-grey room overlooking the river, her main piece consists of several large test-tubes, suspended from the ceiling like chimes. Each contains a sample of water from the River Mersey, collected from various depths. I visited on a stormy day, with the river undulating wildly beneath us & the rain lashing the window. The simplicity and calmness of the work was deeply lyrical; bewitching. I loved it.

I’m drawn to work like this; work that explores and examines and utilises the material of the world, as it is, unaltered. Canell’s work reminded me of the collecting I would do as a child: stones, seashells, conkers, flowers; leaves & twigs – and, yes, even water (returning to the classroom after a school nature walk, aged 10, I found that I had gathered almost nothing but water, from a stream, & various puddles; fascinated by the properties of the autumn light, different in each). I began to think about this; and I realised that collecting, assembling & positioning has always been a central interest. Historically, with my pen & with my cameras, I have collected moments; things that already existed. My ongoing internet project ‘Gathered.’ (on which I collaborate with Sarra Facey) is a collection-in-progress. I have collected other things, too.

The act of collecting is important; to seek and to observe is to enter and understand what surrounds you; to be fully present within it, or before it. It’s almost heuristic; a therapeutic sort of practice. The act of displaying what you’ve found, of repositioning the thing, is equally vital; lending import to the seeming smallest thing (though nothing is too small to be important); removing things from their everyday context, that we might observe and know and understand them, truly.

This is another method, too, of subverting the ego. When I try to make solid objects, things brand new, I feel abominably pompous. A lot of what I do is about self-effacement or self-removal; to reposition myself as an unseen force, rather than an active participant. This is why I prefer to use cameras that limit my control over the final image – the removal of the operator’s ego allows light to do as it will. It seems more honest. And I have always struggled with the manufacturing of commodities (though my books are an exception; a book, however, does seem manifestly useful) – no object that I could make could ever even approach the rich complexity of the things that I have seen or found, as they are.

I don’t think that art should be a dogma, nor a rigid paradigm. It ought to be (for me, at least) a tool for understanding things; for making sense. A sort of psychic/psychological GPS.