What does it mean to be an artist?

Oh, the irony. I publish a gushing post about how I intend to write more, and then follows little but silence, for over a month. It’s been a tough year, in many ways, but this past month has given new meaning to the word. I’ve finally moved house & have been slowly working my way through the boxes. My new home-studio is slowly becoming a lovely little space, and I’m really looking forward to working here.

I’ve been thinking recently about the word ‘creativity’ – a train of thought set in motion by a browse through Waterstone’s. There are a great many books that promise to help you “discover your creative self” or “tap into your creative genius”. It made me wonder about this insane focus on the concept of “creativity” – about what, at its heart, this concept represents, and what its true value might be.

I make all sorts of things. I can knit with some skill and sew a little bit, so I like to make clothes, toys, accessories, things to brighten up my home. (In the current weather, my stash of hand-knitted wool socks have made me feel both warm and smug!) I love to cook, and wherever possible I cook from scratch. When I’ve finished this post, I’ll be closeting myself in the kitchen to make a batch of mincemeat to keep my loved ones & I well-supplied with mince pies all Christmas. One Christmas I made huge quantities of chocolate truffles and vanilla shortbread to give as gifts. As much as possible, I like to be able to make the things that I need; I like to be “inside” the things that I do and that I own, to control both the contents and the means of production. To make something by hand that can easily be bought – say, a glove, or a sock, or a loaf of bread – is a rewarding and powerful thing. It allows me, to a small but significant extent, to step outside the modern pattern of consumption and exploitation. It also makes for the perfect union of action and object, of process and product. The life of the object extends far beyond the period of creation – it has a whole lifetime of use ahead of it, too. These small domestic creations in this way are open-ended. The value of what I will term “domestic creativity” is immeasurable, limitless, empowering.

In my life as an artist, I make very little. I think a lot (as I’m sure regular readers will have deduced!), I write a lot, I make little sketches and plans and I gather and collect and position. Must I pollute my precious ideas by marrying them to some tenuously-related physical structure? Will this in some way give them credibility? This focus on the object is damaging. There are artists who make extraordinarily fluent and resonant objects – but I have also seen a great deal of awkward, ill-thought-through pieces: great ideas, poorly expressed. It’s the classic idea of the artist as being somebody who will make a plaster cast of a piggy-bank and then earnestly declaim that “it’s about the futility of war”. But perhaps that plaster pig will get picked up by an art dealer and end up bought and sold for millions! Bought and sold for millions by people who care not in the slightest about the futility of war, nor about any inferred meaning, but only about speculation and accumulation. So, while domestic creativity circumvents consumption, artistic creativity (object-making) begets consumption. The artist as a commodity-manufacturer. A diamond-miner.

Of course, there is more to say; it’s a complex issue – but the Artists Talking word limit is – once again – against me, so I’ll finish by briefly mentioning Antti Laitinen’s work for this year’s Liverpool Biennial. Laitinen used the gallery space as a workshop in which he built a bark boat, which he then used to navigate the rather grey & dirty waters of the River Mersey. The perfect alliance of action and object! The art is in the action, the idea. The object means – is – nothing more than a boat. Nothing less than a boat. Such perfect, unpretentious simplicity!

Further to yesterday’s post re. studio groups/home-working, today I found this sculpture by Grayson Perry, currently being auctioned to raise money for homeless charity Shelter. It is called Homes Not Studios and is a model of a semi-derelict building, one side of which is pasted with flyers, with the words “ARTISTS OUT” daubed in graffiti on the front.

According to the blurb, the piece is a response to the 1966 film Cathy Come Home, which I haven’t seen – perhaps it’s a model of a building featured in the film? For me, however, it made me consider what the social impact of studio buildings might be.

On the one hand, artists will often inhabit buildings that are otherwise uninhabitable – sometimes, artists are the one thing preventing beautiful but derelict old buildings from being torn down entirely; and the presence of artists can massively enrich an area that would otherwise be sad, dilapidated and forgotten. Additionally, as there is no coherent social housing programme in this country, if these buildings or plots of land were to be sold for housing, the likelihood is that they would be “developed” into horrid blocks full of “luxury apartments”, left to stand empty, awaiting the resurgence of the buy-to-let market. So in this way, it can be argued (and convincingly!) that groups of artists inhabiting derelict inner-city buildings do a lot of good. That’s certainly the way in which I’ve always looked at the matter.

But Perry’s work, with its provocative, confrontational title, has made me think. Although in real terms, many artists exist somewhere around the poverty line, to a homeless person, an artist entering their semi-derelict studio building must seem a great deal like a middle-class person merrily slumming it. And it would be a truly beautiful thing if some of these huge old buildings could be transformed into housing – actual housing that works, rather than speculative buy-to-let monstrosities. But the balance of power here lies with the landowners and the policy-makers. There would be no sense in an artist group surrendering their building only for it to become yet another block of executive apartments. At the same time, it seems tremendously sad that we live in a society where these are the only two choices: a derelict building full of artists (who can go home at the end of the day, when it gets too cold & dark), or a shiny new development standing empty, awaiting the recession’s end. And, just outside, or being shooed from the doorway where they’ve huddled for shelter, a person with no home to go to when it’s cold or dark or rainy. It’s all so terribly wrong-headed.

I’ve been preoccupied by the idea of ‘home’. The floods in Cornwall have transformed small, familiar places into news; a private & internal language made public. My family moved to Cornwall when I was 10, just at the tipping-point of childhood; a wide-open & impressionable time. The place embedded itself within me, & it is partly this happy accident of timing & location that I credit with my intense experience of the natural world. (Put a solitary, sensitive child onto a desolate moor & watch as the whole wildness of it floods into her.) Years later, having moved away, I met a boy from Bodmin. We spent three years living between the Cotswolds and Cornwall, taking turns at each; and I grew to love Cornwall even more. There’s a certain light, a certain silence, a certain quietness that consumes me when I’m there; a clarity & cleanness; a sense that all the clutter & superfluity has been shed, & that I am stripped back to the very barest truth of who I am. It’s a beautiful feeling, and I miss it, and the place that causes it, often. Hearing all these place names on the news triggered a huge resurgence of feelings – homesickness, fondness, nostalgia, wistfulness. I’ve been wondering if Cornwall might, ultimately, be my home.

But the main reason for my obsession with ‘home’ is that (with mere days to spare!) I’ve finally managed to find a new place to live. I’m having difficulty reconciling myself to the idea of no longer spending my mornings with the linden-tree across the road; nor having my horizon mapped by those same chimney-stacks and gabled rooves and poplars. I have lived here for just over two years, which is longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my extraordinarily nomadic adult life. I – unexpectedly, by stealth – have put down roots, have settled. But I must leave, and leave I must – within the coming week. My new flat is across the river, in a very unfamiliar area; it is quite lovely, though – and there is a second room, which I intend to use as a home studio. At last, a dedicated place for working in!

When I first came to Liverpool, I had planned to find a studio-space somewhere. I found that studios were either open-plan (not good for a shy and private person!), freezing cold (not good for somebody with clinically bad circulation) or perfect-but-massively-expensive. I came to realise, too, that from the outside, studio groups can seem almost like cliques; exclusive. (This could be simply because many of the main groups in Liverpool are, or have been, comprised of young graduates whose friendships were cemented at university.) There is also a tendency for outsiders to lump all artists in a studio group together as a cohesive whole, even though there might be clear and obvious differences in their work. Between these things, which troubled me, and the financial concerns, I settled on working at home, and found that I work best in seclusion and privacy. The intersection between art and domestic life interests me.

Working at home brings its own difficulties – distractions (from laundry to internet to playing with the cat), space (in a 1-bedroom flat, space is limited, and even the smallest of works require a surprising amount of space during their creation), isolation. Things like a break, a chat, critical support become difficult or impossible; you have to become very self-reliant, which might not always be healthy. Moreover, in Liverpool, and in my experience, an artist who is not a “known name”, did not graduate in the city and is not part of a studio group must be either incredibly forward and self-confident, or remain invisible. Additionally, studio group members are able to show their work more frequently at members’ shows, or as part of collaborations with other groups. There is almost a sense that one is less of an artist if one is not a member of a studio group. But all of these benefits, to me, cannot outweigh the fact that I make better work when I work from home.

I wonder if, and why, other artists actively choose to work at home.

Wow! This little blog has been selected (along with Jane Boyer’s wonderful, thoughtful blog Working in Isolation) as one of this month’s Choice Blogs! Many thanks to Sarah Rowles – though I have to confess, I’m more than a little panicked. Being a shy/private person and writing a blog is very much like being a shy/private person and being an artist: you have to tell yourself that nobody is listening, that you’re talking to yourself, otherwise the whole endeavour will collapse beneath the weight of it all.

Having said that, this has motivated me to start working a little harder on this blog once again – I’ve been rather disorganised, and let other concerns overtake my writing, though the impulse remains, stutter-starting sadly, like an engine with no fuel. For me, process and progress are inextricably linked, so it’s good to feel this sense of reinvigoration – however shy or embarrassed I may feel about the exposure! A reminder that sometimes putting oneself out there is necessary – that, perhaps, not all things can be resolved internally.

How can art best engage with and influence the world, and the way that we engage with the world? How does art fit in to the wider idea of how I want to live and be understood? How should I measure success – and is it possible to be successful whilst preserving my ethics and integrity? Can I find a new way of being an artist?

These are the questions that fascinate me.

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At the moment I’m obsessed with silence and solitude. I’m reading A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which is a hybrid beast: part autobiography, part history, part philosophical treatise. It’s reaffirming a lot of my ideas, and inspiring plenty of new ones, too. The use of silences and absences in (and as) artworks is something that I want to explore further – art as a context is so much about presence, object, noise and commodity (and often, sadly, gimmicks) that there is almost something subversive about silence and quietness.

Another silent interlude. I’ve a post saved, half-written, about art fairs & gallerists, but it doesn’t seem relevant any more (& I’m sure that any readers will guess my views on the matter!). I’ve been battling bad luck at every turn, from financial difficulties to muscle injuries and mysterious, pervasive illness (I had some blood tests today which should make things more clear). In the face of all this, and the gusting wind & rain that’s been battering my corner of the country, I’ve been spending my time thinking, knitting, reading and writing, and coming (slowly) to certain realisations. A conversation with my philosophy-student friend M. on Wednesday cemented things further – it seems that he & I are working with very similar ideas at the moment, & it was great to share our thoughts & talk about them. I’m yet to work out if I have a philosophic approach to art-making or an artistic approach to philosophising! (I suspect it depends on when you ask me.)

So, progress has been made.

Progress has been made in other ways, too. I’m certainly feeling less angry & defensive than I did earlier in the year; but at the same time, I’m more and more certain about what I do and do not wish to associate myself with or be involved in. I’ve always been a very principled person, for better or for worse (and usually for worse), and though many of my old convictions & certainties have mellowed or disappeared as I’ve moved further through my 20s, many have endured. I suppose I can sum my attitude up quite simply by saying that I think the most important thing is to act with integrity, always. I haven’t managed it as often as I’d like of late, but I’m going to try my best to make sure I do so from now on. This includes not applying for projects that perpetuate a method of “doing” art with which I fundamentally disagree; not getting hung up on earnings as a mark of success; cutting down on endless comparisons & paralysing self-doubt because I work differently to others; and, most importantly, not getting drawn into some of the ugly interpersonal stuff I’ve observed.

It’s a sad consequence of the ubiquity of social networks that many interactions that would previously have been hidden from view are now intensely public. And so you get to see the ugly side of networking, where people publicly fawn over others about whom they’ve spoken quite disparagingly in private. Can I be the only person who witnesses all of this and wonders what’s being said about me when I am not there? Sometimes it takes distance, solitude & reflection to identify a pattern. But, of course, one can’t change other people; what I can do (what I will do) is change the way I behave. So: no more getting drawn into conversations that disparage others (they always make me feel so wretched afterwards); and definitely no more sharing of my own frustrations with people who participate in the above. From here on in, all of my energy is going into positivity, growth, joy. (I’ll be 28 in a few weeks; we’ll call it a new year’s resolution!)

Tonight I’ll be bundling up in woollen things & going to see the big firework display just around the corner in Sefton Park. What could be better?