Conversations with myself

Yesterday I returned from the No Boundaries 2014 conference, which was an open series of meetings and talks on the role of culture in 21st century society. At the meetings were Artists and people involved in the Arts and the talks were given by people young and old that represented different parts of British culture, from teenage bloggers to Google, City libraries to actors.

One of the things that I took from this conference was that culture is such a huge subject and Art is a small part of it. However, I am an Artist and people involved in the Arts community, like my fellow conference attendees want to create Art. We all look to the Arts Council for help and support, especially the money to create it. But the message that rang out loud and clear was, a tough love one, if you want our support you need to give us as much as possible for our money, you need to engage the people that aren’t engaging, you need to spread your Art as far and as wide as possible and even then you need to find as much money yourself as possible.

So as an Artist what do I do now?

I create Art, just like I always do. But I need to look at how I bring the public with me, just saying this is me and this is my Art is not enough. I need to bring the public into my art form with me, I need to talk incessantly about my work through every channel available to me and get people talking about my art, I need to not apply for funding but make my art pay for itself.

Right I get it, but how the hell am I ever going to have time to create Art, when I’m so busy doing all the above. I don’t want to create Art that I think people will want to buy, I want to create Art that interests me. I understand that funding pots have shrunk and that I chose to be an Artist, but if we value culture as much as we say we do, then we need to support that culture and with that we need to support the Artists that produce it.

So, where do I go from here?

I guess I need to adapt, I need to work on a project that explores these ideas and I need to see if it works for me. If not, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Today I find myself sitting in a hotel room pondering tomorrow. I have been given the opportunity to attend the a-n No Boundaries Conference in York and so I wait for a day to see what it brings. I don’t know anyone that is going and yet I am excited, I will be in a room, a building, a conference full of people wanting to talk about art. This concept is frilling and reminds me of my days at Uni, where artists would sit around and talk about our work. It is odd to me now to have this as I am no longer surrounded in my daily world by artists, I have friends that are artists, and even my sister is an artist, but that interaction where you talk just about art is something that does not happen when you are no longer in a studio environment. I love the solitude that I have in my one woman studio and my work has progressed so much, but what is it that a group studio brings?

Do I now ask myself, how do I talk to other artists? Do I need to join a group studio or can I network in another way?

I have joined group studios before but I found the politics of running a studio had a negative effect on my work and also you can’t always find a studio with artists that you feel a kinship to, in relation to your work. My work is very personal and there are times when I can feel very raw or indeed in tears, I don’t want a visual audience to this and in a studio it is hard for this not to happen. So my own studio works for me.

Does this mean that I then have to go to lots of art conferences or attend lots of art networking events? This is hard for me as I am a mother of two young children and I am a wife and I want to see my husband and family, to have time to sit and talk, time to go out and time to just walk together. Also I hate being away from them, as I sit in this hotel room all I keep thinking is that my girls will be tucked up in bed and this is normally the time when my husband and I sit down after our meal together and talk about our days and chat about the things that are important to us and the things going on in the world. Does my art world and home life have to be separate?

Not always, the girls love going to things with me, I took them to present my last piece of art work at the fracking camp and they loved it, but I can’t take them to everything they will soon get board of me talking and them sitting there listening. What about the internet?

The internet is a good way to see what people are up to and to get inspiration or to see how far your own practice can be pushed, but it’s not the same as a good chat. So what of tomorrow, the conference is a symposium on the role of the arts and culture in a world where there is no normal, but what exactly does this mean? The website says that a cultural map is being redrawn…by new behaviours….by new technologies, new models of funding and new local, national and global thinking. Well, all I can talk about is my own work and I know that the internet has had a massive effect on it, as for funding it, the opportunities that were open to me in the past are not available anymore. Hopefully the discussions tomorrow will help me to understand the changes taking place and maybe I can challenge some cultural leaders to find out what they think arts role is in the future and maybe this will help me to figure out what I need to do to ensure that I can financially continue to create work.

Who knows, tomorrow is another day.

Today was a day that I shared my art publicly in a very revealing way for me. I felt very vulnerable and exposed, but, the people that I gave it too, took it with such love and gratitude that my fears were taken away so quickly and were then taken over by joy and inspiration of things that could follow.

I have wanted to explore the concept of craft and especially yarn and how it makes me feel when I’m making it and how others perceive it, for some time. For me creating something with yarn, especially the act of crochet has always been something that really pushes me. I am not very good with keeping to strict directions, I like to learn things through my own experiences and so using a pattern is something that I never do and when I have tried to do it in the past I have always discarded the yarn and moved on to another item, craft or sulked and just zoned out and watched rubbish on the TV, so that I didn’t have to think about it.

Today this changed. I have been looking at creating an art piece to explore the anti-fracking campsite at Barton Moss. I wanted to create an art piece to express the conflict taking place and the different peoples parts played within it. I wanted to show this fractious time and emotional debate freely and without a heaviness that was already on full show. I saw a great opportunity for me to marry my ideas with my fractious relationship with crochet.

I create a baby blanket in crochet using colours and simple symbolism to explore my ideas and today I took that baby blanket to the camp site at Barton Moss and I was so happily surprised at how the camp took my art and displayed it straight away in their communal tent for all to see. I had no questions about why I was doing this or why I felt I needed to bring it to them, they just accepted it as a part of their community and I sat with them, with my children and just talked. We talked about the conflict, we talked about camp life, about friends and their troubles and about the future and what may happen next. I felt a great peace there and felt that my art in its own little way was making a contribution to the future of our land.

The last few days have been quite exhausting, two little girls with tonsillitis, the Barton Moss camp has gone on overdrive with the police reported as going really heavy handed and using every loop hole to stop the protestors, so I’ve not been able to visit again, as I don’t want to get caught up in it and I’m full of a cold.

However, art wise I have had a lot going for me, I’ve been given an opportunity to attend the No Boundaries 2014 with a free artists ticket and I’ve got some really good ideas that I want to try out for the Barton Moss camp site.

As a parent, an artist and someone who thinks far too much, this week has been pretty tough but it’s also been really good for me. It has given me time to think and time to analyse the work that I’m doing and the work I want to do.

This week is half term so I’m doing lots of art with the girls, we have felt tips, white paper plates, some gloopy glue, pencils, lots of different papers and a whole lot of imagination. When the weather improves we are going to the woods to create some twig weaving and some dens, we might even make some tree rubbings and collect some things to make a collage, who knows what this week will bring as the kids are getting to choose the art. This feels very liberating to me, I might even do a project that is led by the girls instead of me, now that would push my boundaries.

As for next week, I’m really looking forward to No Boundaries, it will be quite scary as I’m going on my own and I’ll be without the girls, but it should be really good and it will be worthy way for me to meet new people from the art sector. I’ll post some info on here to let everyone know how I get on.

I’ve just had the funniest conversations that made me really think about myself. The conversation went like this.

I walk in to the playground and I see a couple of the parents talking and I’m asked, ‘you’re a feminist right’, now at first this made me laugh and then I said, ‘you could classify me as a feminist’, at which point the other parent said, see I told you that there was still some around.

Now I won’t go in to the why’s right now, but there was a few from me. Yet, it did really make me think.

Am I a feminist?

What does it mean to be a feminist right now?

Now I could do my usual google search but I’m not going to. This is about what I see to be a feminist and if I consider myself one of them.

So, what is a feminist?

I believe a feminist to be a person, man or women, it doesn’t matter, that stands up for the rights of women.

Am I a feminist? Yes.

However, is there more to it. I believe in the rights of all people. If you only believe in the rights of women, then surely that means that men’s rights are lost and this is something that I don’t believe in.

Let me explain this, as I feel lots of people are shouting in damnation right now. Men having the right over women, that’s not a right, that’s control and that’s something that I do not believe in and would fight against. Women having the right over men, again a big no no. But people being given the skills, support and opportunities to play on a level playing field that I agree on. But it’s not just a male female thing, it’s a race thing, a financial thing, a political thing, a cultural thing.

I believe that no man, woman or child should have the power over another. Every human should be given the same opportunities and the same support, guidance and skills to be able to take up those opportunities.

This means that a child who is born in to a family that drinks, takes drugs and has never worked a day in their life and lives on one of the worst estates in Britain, should be supported the same way that a child born to a family who has highly educated parents, that are loving and caring and live in a very desirable neighbourhood.

Now the first child is going to need a lot of help and support and it’s not just a case of funding or education. It’s a case that they need to be shown care, love and help to develop their confidence, help to understand that they have opportunities and for those opportunities to be right for them.

The second child has already been shown this by the parents, it’s a given that they can take opportunities because they have already seen their parents do the same and if they struggle they have their parents there to guide them through it just like they did.

Who does the first child have to show them direction? Sometimes in a rare moment this might be done by a teacher or a friend’s family, but this is rare.

Is it the governments job, no, but it is their job to support organisations or people to be able to help these children.

Some in fact a lot of people believe in survival of the fittest. Now the fact that the first child is still alive and going to school or in fact not in care shows how much of a survivor they are and in fact are far wiser and far more determined than the second child because they have had to fight all their life. Now surely this is someone worth fighting for.

The same goes for a women subjected to violence by a partner, or a family subjected to harassment by a neighbour or a country subjected to a dictator, the list goes on.

How we deal with it as humans is what makes us.

So in answer to the question am I a feminist? No I’m a humanist.