I am having to force myself to trust my own creative process. If I can't or don't, I feel that a unique opportunity to explore my full potential will have been a wasted one. This year has, so far, been emotionally challenging, and I anticipate it will continue to be so for some time, but I have to accept that it was always impossible to predict where this project was going to take me anyway. It now, more than ever, needs trust and a belief in the potential of the outcome. I really hope that you are still happy coming along for the ride.
The current maelstrom in my head offers a perfect example of threads which need untangling before I can move on with confidence. At the moment, several obsessive trains of thought are feeding from each other, but at the same time, upsetting and confusing each other, and me. This is a dangerous time for me. I feel as if I could quite easily drown if I don’t hold onto ‘reality’, but reality has to be in parenthesis: the apparent security of Plato’s cave is sometimes very enticing.
Today, I said,
I would like to be sectioned.
All responsibility taken away.
Sat in a conservatory and left
to write, to draw, to sew.
Fed and watered by some almighty hand.
One way of dealing with these confused and troubled thoughts, and try to use them to inform my artistic endeavours, is to disassociate from them in order to separate them out. I have to find a way of preserving and labelling them until I’m ready. I find that I can attach myself to the ‘tangible reality’ of domesticity, in order to find boxes to sort ideas into, but in doing this, I need to be aware of the danger of allowing the overlap and the knotting to become fixed prematurely. Is megalomania really uninvited or detrimental if the thoughts are your own?
Inevitably, while I try to wrestle some of these thoughts into submission (aka a box) the merge of ideas will inevitably continue to happen (on a subconscious level if nothing else), and I acknowledge that that is probably where the real understanding takes place. But at this stage I feel that there is a more urgent need to try and separate the strands so that I can see what I’ve got. This is the role of the archivist. The role of the artist or poet is to reform these ideas into cohesive, shareable, novel, comprehensible structures.
The real ‘lightbulb moment’ for me was, sometime ago, accepting that self-preoccupation is genuinely not an attempt to justify oneself, to validate one's emotions or to be able to deny criticism … I don't feel the need to do that anymore.
The process of untangling is just my conscious mind searching for some understanding.
At the moment I am trying to untangle:
the need to memorialise
the need to capture or acknowledge emotions
and the need to move forwards with a visual interpretation of an intellectual premise
My very good friend, Jane Sudworth, once wrote a poem about catching a seagull by its feet, to see what would happen. Last week she caught one… I'd like to think that we are all getting closer to catching our own seagull.
I'm still trusting that an exhibition called 'Three Score & 10' will open (somewhere) on 25th April 2023. I hope you will be there to share it with me. x x
