Threads

1

Funny how you look back and are able to see your life in chunks and eras. Sometimes one blends into another, its passing unnoticed until years later. Sometimes there is an almighty crash as one ends and another begins. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Hindsight and experience make it possible to spot the patterns and can provide clues for future change and movement.

Sea Change

Great expression… the feeling that the current is changing, water underneath is moving… at some point I will find myself swimming in a new direction.

Of course, in this blog, at this time, I cannot be specific about such things, but I can feel the sea change. The rip tide is pulling at my feet, my knees, very slowly rising up my body.

I must rush to finish tasks so that I can “put my affairs in order”. There are things I want to achieve and complete before the tide sweeps me off and the surf crashes over my head.

Occasionally – the other morning for instance – there are moments of sharp clarity that I know I am in the wrong place, that there is something better waiting, that an opportunity has been missed. When it happens, I hope I’m ready for it… I think I will be…

Time will tell…

Time and tide wait for no (wo)man.

2

I’d be rubbish working on my own, isolated in a studio, starving artist in a garret scenario. I am a slave to the comfort blanket – my adult transitional object. I don’t even see it sometimes. I seem unable to question myself realistically. When I ask myself questions about my work, the best way to go about things, I answer myself very politely saying exactly the things I want to hear – take the easy way. Bloody rubbish! Is it possible to achieve this by yourself? Am I beating myself up about something impossible? Because if you tell me it is impossible, that’s great. Because it makes me feel stupid. I swan along quite happily unable to see the implications of my methods. All it takes is one person to say “are you aware that…” and suddenly I see it.

I think I’m wearing the bloody comfort blanket over my head.



Back to normal.

Haven’t woken up feeling sick like yesterday and the day before.

Stitching as fast as ever now, so all is well. Interesting that I can gauge my state of health and mind by the amount of stitching done.

I’m working frantically on the lyrics shirt, so it can be ready for the 20th and used in a photo shoot. It’s a bit of a haitus, a step away from the other work I’m doing, a stand alone bit of work. Me, but also Dan, connected, but also separate.

The work with Bo, recorded in our joint blog pix, began as another island, but as I get going on that, the work is becoming more connected to my other work. I have 5 or 6 bits of work on the go at the moment, in various stages of development/completion. Of course they are all connected, by me, but also to each other. I had started to think of them all as family, from new born baby, to distant cousins, depending on their current state, and the amount of direct care they need from me.

A Deleuzian rhizome perhaps… all those underground connective roots?

I feel them more as family though… closer… and with more arguments.

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2910921/

www.dan-whitehouse.com

I’m just having a bit of a shaky day. I had a very close near miss on the M6 last night, where without the presence of mind of a couple of other drivers, who slammed their brakes on to give me the space to swerve quickly out of the way, I would have ended up squashed under a truck whose driver had decided at the very last second that he wanted to be on the M6 not the A38M…

Anyway… I was fine last night, a bit tense when I got back, but ok. Today, however, has been decidedly wobbly. I managed to teach all day, but then when the bell rang at 3.30, I went into a swift decline… delayed shock I’m told.

I tell you this (not for sympathy or anything, as these things happen all the time, my plight, sadly, is not unusual) as a background to what I have found I turn to as therapy, because, to the detached, out-of-body being sat on my shoulder observing, this is interesting…

I have come home unable to do much but lie in bed, my legs are too wobbly it seems, to hold me upright. My body cannot get warm. So my MacBook becomes a source of heat. My son and my husband, are caring, but I think bewildered… I’m not like me.

I read old emails that I’ve flagged, kind words from friends about my work. I look at photos of other people’s work: Marion Michell’s, Franny Swann’s, and a piece of film made by my friend Bo Jones. Emotional pieces all of them. Weirdly comforting. I am listening to the new Villagers album, Awayland, again, emotionally deep and varied, disturbing in places too. I listen to recordings that I have made too, stupid bits of domestic machinery, heavy breathing, and buses and trains.

I can’t seem to hold a needle tonight, strange feeling… and I can’t seem to talk to people without bursting into tears. But these glimpses into deep emotion, expressed so beautifully by other people, they are bringing me back, I can feel it. I’ll be ok soon.

Right.

Enough of this.

I’m getting on my own nerves again.

All this navel-gazing arty bollocks.

Just get on with the work woman.

What a whinger!

A certain amount of introspection and self-examination is good, provides insight and clarity.

Then it becomes a pain, debilitating, strangling, confining, stultifying.

I need to count my blessings, of which there are many, and get out there and just bloody do it.

Still thinking about my life as an artist. And also thinking about a friend’s words that 24/7 art would send him to the madhouse. I think I’d like to give it a go, take that risk. It won’t happen anytime very soon, but I’ve started to think about the possibility seriously. A flexible path to income is the key, so opportunities that crop up can be grasped!

With regard to this end…

A phenomena I have encountered recently, is the Artist’s Lie. When it comes to talking among ourselves, we shouldn’t do this, it is misleading. The Artist’s Lie is that thing where you are led to believe a person is supporting themselves SOLELY through their art. The Arts Council et al, and successful sales are paying their mortgage. BUT when you get down to the nitty gritty, they drop into the conversation they are lecturing, working in galleries, doing admin work for the local authority, or shelf stacking under cover of darkness at the weekends. Be honest folks please, don’t perpetuate the myth. We need to have an “income stream” and yes, it would be amazing if it was all totally related to our art. But it more often than not isn’t the case. Yes, I agree, as discussion evolved from the a-n consultation thingy this week, that we should go out and make our own opportunities, and most of us do, in whatever way we can. But these efforts eat into the time when we could be making. Most of us don’t want to spend our time chasing paper, landlords, plumbers, reading the small print, filling in the forms, and many of us don’t personally have the skills to do so. So we band together in little groups, for support, protection and “Front” that gives us confidence.

The downside of this is The Clique. Isolated little bundles of artists, scared to let other people in on it. Establishing an excluding identity, codifying speech so that only those in the know understand.

What is required is the opposite… the Anti-Clique, or perhaps more pertinently Ante-Clique. Be open, include, welcome, smile, don’t take yourself so seriously, speak plain English.

The Ante-Clique is growing… #anteclique

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