This is a catchup blog! It was published on Coventry ArtSpace back in May 2020 but, as I say later on, time has been moving in a strange way this year.
Montage of four photos from lockdown walks around Whitnash.
Phytoplasma (‘unculturable, phloem-limited insect-transmitted plant pathogens’ ref. Science Direct) seen in conjunction with the giant willow aphid, Shard of salt wear pottery, trig point, cracks.
So this is what I wrote back then:
This blog is terribly overdue. I’m sorry. Everything changed this year and, with one thing and the other, I lost grip on my artist side for a while. We all had to deal with an awful lot and we all tried to find ways of doing that, so this blog is a bit about all that but also a bit about coming out the other side.
I found my blog incredibly hard to write because I have no plans. I always had plans before the pandemic. My own plans. Now I find I am pushed this way and then that by various restrictions caused by pandemic planning, or by worry, or by others being unable to do the certain things they always did. Not least of these is my child’s school not needing to do what they always did. And this is happening to everyone - I’m not special! (As an artist I like to be at least a little bit special.)
I find though that this lack of being able to create plans leaves me unable to make work and I realise something which was hitherto an unknown criterion: that for me to make artwork is to have a grasp on the future as being in some way roughly similar to the way things are now so I can develop ideas and maintain momentum. Again, not special in this regard.
So much changed so quickly – and don’t get me wrong, I like quite a lot of the changes – the clear skies, the quiet, the drop in air pollution, the many new walks, board games, the weekly online family pub quiz and a lack of pressure to go out and socialise. I don’t miss the feeling that I’m missing out on events, but I find it impossible to make work.
My space contracted; time became elongated and stretched thin over all the things in the house. Or did time get heavy, grow fat and lay thickly instead? I can’t decide. Some of this stretched/fat time and space is wonderful; I remember daily to put out food for the birds and enjoy watching them come and eat it, but I am frequently at a loss over how to help my lonely child thrive when she misses her routine and school friends so much. I’m stuck between caring for family and needing to complete paying design work to my usual standard, and art; well there is no time for it anymore.
Sadly, I have to conclude art does not sustain us. I suppose I always knew it was an indulgence - proper top of the pyramid stuff. Not that I feel I have nothing to offer the wider world via it, and not that it doesn’t satisfy an inner craving to communicate and dwell on how the world hangs together. In this time of trauma and financial unrest what I have experienced is that making and sharing art does not offer much back to the artist, even though there has been an incredible and laudable support effort within local and regional artistic communities. Art won’t feed my family and there is nothing I can do that will make it so. I’m incredibly sad about this. So, to save my disappointment I’ve just ignored all those ideas and stored them under mental dust sheets. Moreover, I’ve also detached from critical reading and critical social media as I find it too frustrating to spectate and not engage. I can’t do that with art any more than I can with my family. I can’t do it by halves; art demands and deserves more of me than that.
Uncritical making however, has been such a boon and I am so thankful for the piles of materials, paints and fabrics that I’ve hoarded over the years and all the crafting knowledge I learned. So, in the early weeks I plumbed in to a national effort to make things for NHS and other key workers and now I’m making alterations to our own clothing; mending, making and recycling. My sewing machine has never been busier.
The difference I think I perceive happening here is that making is materially useful. It meets my need to make a difference, and whereas Fine Art is emotionally/philosophically dense I don’t need the requisite distance from this traumatic time in order to process my thoughts into that kind of making. I am a better person for having been able to spend a couple of years at the top of my pyramid of needs where a sort of deeper creativity resides and I will someday restore myself there, but those future days are not these days.
And that was that.
So… Upstream of all this, retrospectively downstream now, is that ArtSpace Coventry have been wonderfully supportive towards me, and are still being so. I was released from my graduate residency with a firm plan to restore the final three months and show my work when a routine ‘new normal’ settled in, that mostly being reliant on decisions made by the government and my daughter’s school. I’m immensely glad to say that we agreed on the beginning of October. Therefore, currently I’m assessing and rationalising all my notes, photos and work from the first six months so that I can begin the last three with a written proposal of work for an exhibition in City Arcadia Gallery. Tentatively I feel like I can begin to make plans and artwork again, obviously, this is incredibly exciting and absorbing but I know that the pandemic situation can change again, and though that may create a cast on what I produce I feel more positive about making art than I have for quite a while.
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