But, having won a Review bursary my hand has been forced and here I am dipping my toe in the digital stream with some thoughts that will noodle around my attempts to once again re-invent my mode of work.
24th February 2014
Weather: Spring in the air after tempests and floods.
Picking up the thread of a thought from back in June on lifespans.
(But first; just for anyone who is interested in the outcome of my broken van meltdown: I eventually bought a very cheap old VW transporter from a friend of a friend. Much smaller than the old Transit, but plain, simple and economic. It is doing fine for the moment.)
I think that I have breached blogging etiquette by the indecent interval that has elapsed since my last post. In truth, life has indeed been too short to blog over the last months whilst I have been dealing with one of those periodic log jams of events in life that has demand all my energy.
I have been clearing my mothers house. She is 92 and has been forced by Parkinsons into a nursing home. The family home has been empty for eighteen months and it is time to face the inevitable admission that she has to let it go. She was a librarian by profession and an archivist and cataloguer by nature and so sorting her house is like conducting an archaeological dig through the strata of our family life and further back into my parents’ individual pasts.
I am also re-discovering my own history through photos, hand written letters (a sad loss to the digital revolution in our lives) keepsakes and my old artwork from nursery school to art school and beyond. I am deeply immersed in taking stock of where I have come from and of possessions accumulated over several life spans to see what I want to take and what I want to let go of.
It is interesting to look at what I am keeping; what is important and why. Mostly it is things which represent a memory that are keys to more profound truths about myself and my life: photos of family holidays, a thumb pot made by my dad who I lost when I was 10, a letter from my mum; talismanic objects to keep in a box that you re-discover occasionally. But amongst these more serious items are some daft toys and memorabilia that raise a laugh and make you want to pass that laugh on to another generation. Amongst the forlorn boxes of stuff to go for house clearance, my brother and I once again fired the Dan Dare Space Gun at each other and carved up between us the Dinky car collection.
So back to units of time and life spans; we have had to condense my mother’s stuff into one room, but have distributed what remains amongst her grandchildren so that her life will continue to echo in theirs through the association of memory and object. The things I have kept are enabling me to reflect not only on where I have come from but where I want to go next. They are acting as a measure for my life in the way geological and archaeological strata mark the passage of time and history.
They may or may not become the subjects of artworks yet to be made, but they point the way forward for re-orienting my creative practice towards a more personal journey and being more choosey about the public commissions I apply for. My wife’s imminent retirement is also forcing a radical re-think of how we will make ends meet without her salary and in the absence of a significant pension. Greater self-reliance and a move towards self initiated work seems to be the way forward, but it is a slow and opaque process that has to be allowed to evolve in its own way. Meanwhile I am trying to tie up loose ends and make the space to create.
19th June 2013
Weather: warm and sunny, but close and now feeling unsettled.
What is the lifespan of a Transit van?
Here’s another unit of time I am wrestling with. I seem to be having some kind of existential crisis over an MOT failure.
My workhorse, family transport, home away from home has reached that moment when rust has eaten away at it to such an extent that it really has to be let go.
It is fifteen years old, and I have owned it for ten. At its’ heart is the legendary Ford 2.5 litre diesel engine which have been know to do half a million miles if they are looked after; but the “backbone of Britain” tends to rust, and so it is with mine.
So I have been pitched into that twilight zone of the wheel-less; forcing me to run my wife to her work so that I can use her car for mine. Having to run two vehicles so that we can both work is one of those facts of life for many of us, but is it more true to say that in part we both work in order to run two vehicles? It is true to say that my work has been completely subsumed by the search for a new vehicle.
I find that buying any major item always induces a tendency to think you can afford more than you really can, because what you really want is almost always just a bit over the absolute upper budget limit you have set yourself. Combine this with the fact that your absolute upper budget limit places you in that zone of second hand vehicles where you are at extreme risk of buying the problems that the previous owner has just avoided by trading it in for something newer and you have a toxic combination.
This is especially true now that no vehicle that is less than fifteen years old is free from a host of electronic management systems that are prone to failure and require a host of technicians with expensive diagnostic tools to fix.
My heart tells me that I want old technology, that can be fixed with a spanner on the side of the road, but my head tells me that I need new technology that whisks me down the Autoroute in six-speed, fuel efficient and low-emission comfort. One I can still just about find for £1,500 or so, the other will set me back at least £8,000. One minute I find I am seduced by the silken words of the guy trying to part me from £10K for a gleaming Euro 5 compliant machine, the next I am kicking tyres in the scummy old yard of some bottom feeder dealer who buys the trade in’s off the bloke selling the ex lease, low mileage beauties.
All the while I am trawling the web for the perfect vehicle that isn’t two hundred miles away and being sold by some poor bugger who is being forced to sell the camper van of his and his families’ dreams because he has lost his job as a result of the “challenging economic climate”. I have spent hours consulting web forums discussing the relative merits of different engine and gearbox configurations trying to find some light amongst the fog of indecision.
So, the life of this particular transit is a useful measure not only of time (fifteen years) but also of change. In those fifteen years our need and ability to be hyper-mobile has increased just as our need and ability to be still and localised has been made possible by the internet and necessary by the devastating affect our mobility is having on the planet. During the last fifteen years we have also become less self-reliant and more dependent on “specialists” to fix the increasingly complex systems we all rely on. At the same time these systems keep us focused on the endless upgrade path they demand. We are at once liberated and enslaved by our technology.
None of this is especially original thinking, but it is an interesting (and exhausting) process to be going through and gives me pause to reflect on what I am trying to achieve in this re-think of my working practice.
10th June 2013.
Weather; Sunny.
A break in the cloud of being busy.
Time to put thought into words.
I am at one of those crossroads in life. My daughters have left home, my 91 year old mother has finally given up the increasing struggle of living independently and I’m looking at a pensionless future. So I have been thinking about time and how we measure it.
For some of my year I live within sound of the bells of a country church in France. They peel three times a day; at seven in the morning, at midday and at seven in the evening. The Angelus Bell is a call to prayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus in the Catholic tradition, but in this quiet corner of the World it also regulates a pattern of life that suits my temperament.
I like getting up at the morning bell to work in the garden before the Sun gets too hot and then be reminded at noon to break, rest and prepare and share food. The evening bell is again a call to rest and eat together.
I find I can make a healthy balance between physical work, creativity, and down-time spent in the company of my family and friends in this environment which is, of course, presently an oasis of holiday in the hard realities of life as an artist back here in England.
It gives a glimpse though of what I am aiming for in re-making my creative practice in response to the new landscape emerging from the wreckage of the great banking crash.
The time to create is what we need to function as artists, but this time is so easily lost to administration in general and my computer in particular, which while being a powerful and liberating tool I enjoy using, is also a demanding presence that sucks whole mornings dry in an endless stream of over-communication via email.
It is too easy to kid oneself that, by being at the keyboard, something useful and productive is happening, when in fact giving myself permission to quit the screen and play in my workshop instead would be far more productive in the long term.
Which is why I have felt that life was too short to add another digital task to my day, especially when I am not sure if what I have to say will truly add much to the Babel of voices already blogging.
I am open to persuasion however, and I want to honour the work that AN and AIR are doing as supporters and advocates for us as a community of artists, so I will offer here my reflections on conversations with interesting people I have while using the bursary.
12th June 2013
Weather: Like November; high wind and driving rain.
Lighting a fire tonight to drive away the damp and broken van blues.
It seems to me that the time has come when there is a need for me to cease expecting to get work through invitation or application and instead to find confidence in the experience bottled in my 30 year back catalogue to be a catalyst in creating change in the wider world. I want to use this experience making a living through my art to make a better mode of living for myself and family whilst adding to the pool of good work by artists around the globe making positive change in communities.
This blog will be a record of a small part of that journey.
