In July 2024 I received a grant from Arts Council England (ACE) as part of their Developing Your Creative Practice Programme. This funded me for a year to explore the relationship between my creative writing practice/ text in general and my visual art practice. Part of my proposal was that I would produce a diary of the year’s experience to benefit others who either specifically wanted to learn about DYCP grants or who were interested in the creative process generally.
My intention for the diary
I took the decision to keep a contemporaneous journal of my year but to write the public blog version on an ongoing basis 3-4 months behind time. The slight delay allows me to add reflections on the experiences and to see emerging patterns. This supports my own reflective process, slowing me down and forcing periods of review. It also creates a realistic picture for others of how my creative practice works by showing the ‘looping around’ process I often go through. My intention is to share practical resources in each post under a clear heading so readers can always just mine the blog for links. I also want to produce an auto-ethnographical account of the year that will stand as an artwork by itself.
I am as interested – more interested in fact – in the creative process as I am in the final finished artifacts of creativity. Despite being well exhibited and published, I often write or make and have no great interest in showing or selling the outcome. Still, I value the work for what the experience of learning and making added to my days in terms of joy, stimulation, solace, discovery, growth, understanding of the world, and personal change.
There are constant tensions in the creative world between commerciality and the personal, between the private process and the public sharing. Often when I wish to learn from artists I cannot see how they got to the finished work in their glossy websites and that disappoints me. I want to see behind the curation to the reality of the process – to see their ‘working out’. I am not at the standard of those artists I have in mind, Yet, this grant is a motivation to be the change I want to see and create such a publicly available record of one ordinary life lived creatively.
I cannot share every part of my year in this blog or you would need a year of your own to relive it minute by minute. Our studio time is not separate from our time in the car wash or the supermarket because creative thoughts take place consciously and subconsciously at all times of day and night. Some thoughts are still not fully formed or are too private to share. However, my intention is to create a documentary work that sits at a comfortable place on the public-private spectrum. I hope it will be inspiring and comforting to those coming along a path behind me or walking a parallel path and wanting to see over onto mine.
The starting point
At the point I got the grant I was at a step change in my creative life. I was 54, had been published in magazines, journals, and in book form since I was 16, and since taking up art via textiles in my 40s had had many exhibitions worldwide. All that had been alongside a legal career, however. When health issues led to an ill-health retirement I became free to deepen my creative life. I longed to stop the fast-paced production, to stop mailing quickly from one large show to another, and to work in a slower deeper more considered connected way. However, the freedom which seemed so wonderful became a source of confusion and bewilderment. I got lost in all the possibilities and this feeling was compounded by a general loss of confidence and sense of professional identity that came from the circumstances in which I left law. The grant year was an opportunity to face this situation, work with mentors, and see what I wanted to make of the future. My fear was that it would not work and I would stay stuck or even get more bogged down. At the time of writing, I am a quarter of the way through so I cannot tell you what will happen. Why not read along with me and find out?
Ultimately there will be many posts in this diary. There is an index of all posts with a description of the main topics here.