Cats are not Real Company

I have been thinking this week about studio spaces. That precious piece of the world that exists just for an artist, our own little hovel of self doubt, self expression and self absorption. Our brain outside our brain. I have been contemplating on how our studio space, and our feelings about that space, affect our artistic practice.

I’m going to tell you something I hate telling people. And I am scared, because above all things this is what I have been judged on the most, and it usually hurts!

When I was at university we had a lecture on the outstanding inspiration that is Nora Fok. I remember clearly somebody saying ‘She works from home as a full time mother and artist”. I thought, “Bloody hell, I bet that is great.” but I knew I would probably end up married to another artist, and let’s face it, unless I married Damien Hurst there was no way in hell that one artist’s wage could support a family. No, I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to be betrothed to an art world superstar and I would just have to do a job like everyone else. My teenage dreams were crushed ten minutes after I had them.

I met my artist partner, a blacksmith and by no means a businessman. We are a pair of idiots to say the least. And I got my job, selling soap and bathbombs and dressing as Rocky Balboa. And then IT happened. The thing that changed who I was as a person to most of the outside world, or so it seemed.

We inherited a house.

There, I said it. We own our own home.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people I know. I am so grateful that I don’t know what to do with my feelings, I never have. And I’ve never known how to explain them without thinking as though I sound like I am bragging. I was so excited when we moved in, and when I moved my supplies into the little studio that had once belonged to an author who lived here (I am getting to the point, here, don’t worry).

The thing is, that excitement very quickly turned into guilt. People I love, people who deserve a home of their own far more than I do, were struggling. And I was comfortable. All that went through my head was “We shouldn’t have this”, “We don’t deserve this house”, “This is wrong”. And I still feel that way.

So I had my dream (sort of, I still work part time for minimum wage and we are still so poor that we check down the back of the the sofa cushions for food money, who knew paying bills on a whole house was so expensive?), I had my studio and my garden to look out onto, I had security. But when I sat in that studio I just thought about how hard my friends were working, paying for their little space and going there right after work and working their butts off, and I felt worthless. Being in my studio made me feel guilty, and my work felt like it lacked all integrity and passion.

It struck me last week, when I finally stood up to someone who judged me as privaleged and dismissed me, that I was being the worst kind of ‘privaleged’ person I could be. I was being the kind of person who pretends they are not, whilst feeling sorry for themselves. I can’t do anything about this house, it happened, it is a part of our lives now, and how bloody wonderful is that?

I came from nowhere, and I will probably always feel like I don’t deserve anything, but I do. We all do. My life won’t always be roses and I might still lose everything, but at least I will have made the most of it.

Sometimes it feels hard to justify living as an artist, to yourself, and to others. And I don’t really have any answers, I wish I did. But I know what feels right in my heart, and making artwork, no matter how, it just that thing.

My last post was about my need for success, and how my perceived lack of it stunted my ability to create work.

During my hiatus from creating I experienced parts of the London art scene from the other side of the fence, the perspective of the gallery owners, of the exhibition organisers, and of the art book writers. Whilst this was a hugely rewarding and educational endeavour, it almost ruined art for me. When I look back at that now, that was the wrong way to feel.

I found the ‘scene’ to be a mildly cliquey affair, with the same artists cropping up over and over, and not always due to the skill or integrity of their work. In one case in particular the whole experience seemed to be cleverly engineered by people just looking to make money from an inexperienced artist with fashionable friends. A dealer decided to enthuse over them, his associates and followers would the buy the work, gallery organisers would then invite the artist to sell the work at other shows, and yet more people would arrive at the exhibition and be informed by these associates that this was the best piece of art on the new London art scene. I saw some works made by people whose research material could not have been more than the back of their eyelids. I saw glitter pen covered, cut-out kittens make hundreds of pounds, simply because the artist was easy to manipulate, and the work easy to understand and ergo, to sell.

This was when I should have questioned my idea of ‘success’. I should have questioned it because my idea was that if I had work in a show, and if someone bought that work, that was success. When that didn’t happen for me, no amount of admiring comments made me feel like less of a failure.

I was wrong. Oh, it feels fantastic to show your work, it really does. And what a great ego boost it is when someone pays for it, when someone trades money that they worked for for something that you worked for… but that is not why I went to art school. That is not why I first picked up a pencil and drew, or why I first stitched a crude little doll and gave her a history and a name. It is certainly not why I chewed my nails off during my degree and aimed to make work that would make people cry.

Why have I ever measured artistic success with money? When someone reacts to my work, when they feel something, when they have an experience in their life that they would never have had, had I not sat down and created that object – that – is when I should feel proud. In this time when arts budgets are being cut left right and centre, and less value (monetary or otherwise) is being placed on creative culture by the government, why should any of us judge our own work using the rules with which they live? Should we not be shrugging of those prejudices and agendas and creating because creating is so important, because it is our cultural backbone, because it changes lives and makes us feel in ways money can never make us feel?

I need money to live. But I don’t need money to create. And I will cherish each sale and each show because it helps me to live the life I love, but I will never again feel worthless if those things don’t happen for me.

Hello,

I am Holliand Otik, and I am a successoholic.

That is not to say I’m a perfectionist, I am far from it. I’ve done a few bodge jobs in my time. What I mean is that I NEED success. I need it to feel validated, to feel encouraged… I need it in order to get up and into my studio and to churn my brain butter into clups of milky ideas (disgusting).

I have had successes, I won the young artist’s prize at the Cork Street Open Exhibition during my second year of university, I finished university with a First, then our stand won the Best Stand award at New Designers in islington. I was on a roll, I applied for the Threadneedle Prize exhibition after my second Cork Street show and I got in, making the final 190 out of over 3,000.

Then it happened. Or rather, it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. I didn’t sell a thing, no one contacted me, the great conversations I had with people at the private view did not materialise into anything and that magazine never did call me back.

My first failure. Or rather, my last success. I got a part time job, that slowly leeched into a full time job, that turned into a WAY TOO MANY HOURS KILL ME NOW job. I moved house, from thriving, artistic Bristol, to rural, slow paced, crafty Herefordshire: a place where opportunities abound, but you really have to push for them.

I did not push. I set up my studio and I sat in it and nothing happened. I felt like I was back at my first day of art school. Like I had no idea what my interests were, or my style, or even my medium. I felt as though I had let myself down, like a fraud. As though all of that previous success and excitement was just luck. I felt alone, alone in my studio with just four cats and my old degree work for company.

That was when it hit me. I was alone. That was the problem. Those successes, they had come from moments of clarity, of enthusiasm, of discourse and challenging discussion. “I can’t do this alone!” I suddenly thought. But I was alone, in a small city, in my own little home workspace. My saving grace became the internet, I followed blogs of artsts who inspired me, and I started to make work again. “Look how cool these people are” I thought (think), “I wish I was like that! Look at these group shows! Look at this crazy project! Wow what a lot of fun being an artist is!” I said to myself, eating my third microwaved bowl of noodles of the day with precariously glaze-covered utensils.

I realised then that I needed to make art friends. I need to relate to people who feel the same passions as me, people who know what it is to have an idea stuck in the back of their neck. People who know that buzz at four in the morning, when you lie awake with a plan forming in your head but you are too afraid to write or draw in case you damage it, but too scared to sleep in case you forget. People who have probably dropped slimy noodles on themselves, looking at people just like them, whilst thinking “I wish I could do that!”.

So here I am. Here I am pouring my embarrassing tale of laziness and self absorption out into the internet, and asking (a little nervously):

WILL YOU BE MY ART FRIEND?

Please?