- Pre-existing ideas of the kind of work I should or could be making
- Ideas of the kind of artist I want to be, should be, or can be
- An overwhelming sense of moral responsibility to make things that are somehow ethical
- Doubt over my own judgement in what ethical things I could make
- Fear of revealing too much about myself
- Spending too much time looking at / reading what I’ve already done
- Nonspecific worries and anxiety
- Writing down ideas of what I could be doing instead of doing it
- Unrelated emails
- A feeling of nagging unease
- Encountering the work of successful practitioners that I think isn’t very good or interesting or which so obviously comes from a place of privilege and worrying that I’m going to make the same mistakes
- The idea that I am an individual making individual work that is somehow about me and reflects me
- The idea that whatever I create has to be somehow interesting
- Worrying about something else important or stressful that I have to do in the next few days
- The idea that whatever I create has to be meaningful, significant, authentic, and have a value in the world
- Not accepting or understanding that it’s simply OK just to make stuff for the sake of it, for myself
Earlier this year I was lucky to have been awarded a Professional Development Bursary from a-n and in the past few months I have been trying out a radical new approach to my practice: to go back to the beginning and see what excites and interests me. One of the things that has kept coming up as I have tried to start making work is all the things that literally stop me, or hold me back, from making work. There are some obvious external practical ones (money, time, resources), but then I’ve begun to notice how many are internal too.
This list is some of those internal ones (leaving aside the practical ones for now) that I can think of right now. I feel like making work is about engaging in an ongoing psychic struggle with any number of them, but that somehow they are also necessary obstacles too.
