It has been over a year since I left the safe confines of the institution, almost a year since I sailed across the sea to the port of Amsterdam. After finishing my MFA – two years of intensity, with four years prior – I longed for a distance that could only be found with an ocean between us. Four months in I was all a-crawl within the dark depths of the Northern Sea, calling out like a siren in the night. But without the safety of the institutional cage I floundered without a life-vest. Like Rapunzel in her modern high-rise, I would stare down at the world, waiting for something to come and wake me out of my stupor, or is that Sleeping Beauty? They both translate to the fable I had created. Alas no prince came. So I began to dream of familiar climes, and clicked my heels three times “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”. And so I was home, with all the Bisto™ gravy I could ask for. But then, as always happens when you get what you think you want, you suddenly don’t want it so much anymore. I felt like I had opted for the easy landing. I can climb that tower for myself. So back I clicked, and down that tower I slowly climbed. So here I am a year on. I left the high-rise for a brown-stone, and the institution for the atelier. I still canoe back and forth between familiarity and Amsterdamned, but without the itch (I know there’s cream for that).
Now for the real work to begin to make work outside of the coop. Pushing myself outside of the realms of comfort, I have begun to make work on the move, between continents, underneath the tented arch of bedcovers sheathed in torch-light, under the watchful eye of a fellow passenger. I always felt I needed ‘stuff’ to make work, a safe haven from which to create. But I have learnt I can carry it with me in that little place inside my head, I will admit the studio helps to consolidate your thoughts, and is successful in enveloping you within its world, and I would never give up my studio for all the tulips in Holland, but I am liberated by my new found ability to crawl into this inner recess and create. I think writing has helped, all these long journeys with notebook in hand, using any stop gap as an excuse to narrate. Also owing to the collaboration that has ensued between Richard Taylor http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/ and myself (Edinburgh – Amsterdam) that made viscous these perpendicular boundaries, where time and space have become a mutable blur in the landscape.
