The period covered by this blog was the start of my formal DYCP year but I had already had a couple of sessions with my mentor Susan Stockwell. She had introduced me to the artist Ann Hamilton and my journal is full of notes about her work and writing. I was astounded by the helpfulness and yet the seeming unreachability of some of her words. I found myself longing to experience art the way she did.
Words from Ann Hamilton
“Art happens as a process of finding what you need. When you are making you are moving from what you know to what you don’t know and you don’t always know what you need but you have to set up the conditions for finding it.”
There is a huge irony that I was looking to her as an expert and yet she was telling me that she spent the bulk of her life seeking the experience of not knowing. She carried on:
“It is not only an act of finding it is an act of paying attention to what you pay attention to and it is not an accident when your vision or your thought process or your body is drawn one way or another.”
Three months on from first noting that in my journal I find myself creating this blog as a way of doing just that. When I research and read there is a kind of frenzy of excitement and hyper-links. I have to have the fountain pen and journal by the side of the ipad if I am web-browsing in order to catch all the sparks of interest. It is a fast process however and now I am going back over the past I find that that recording is merely quick documenting not deep attention paying. Now as I return to and reflect on my journal I can pay real attention to what I recorded, making new journal entries that go deeper and are more insightful. No doubt in due course, I will reflect upon this week’s entries in the same way and so a looping stitch in time will take place over and over.
Why did I record this? What makes me want to return to it and look for longer now?
What was I really searching for when I was hopping through this website or book?
On a later page I see that I wrote that Ann Hamilton said that she could not draw but that she could draw with a camera in her hand. In another talk she said:
״Reading is Like drawing. How one reads is one’s studio״
I don’t really know what this means but I know it captivates me and so I am highlighting for myself to explore further. Today, searching for the quote online again I find a reference to it in an article about a show of hers I had not seen in my previous reading. In this show she makes reading a part of the art, used a commonplace technique weaving a show out of fragments of other people’s writings. Have been thinking of art as solely about odd words on a canvas or writing only newly drafted pieces. Finding this article today by the process or returning and reflection opens up a new vista. And yet I am reminded of what I wrote in my last blog about the dangers of looking at people with access to whole teams of installers, huge institutional galleries and funding as examples,. the danger of letting that kind of art making be a norm against which I don’t and can’t measure up.
Progress made
In the days covered by this blog I found a way of writing that seems to have now slipped away from me again. It was sunny and I sat for hours a day on the warm patio with a softback notebook and pen. I hung in the hammock and thoughts and scribbled odd words at a time and soon, I had written a piece of literary flash fiction. I worked it all up phrase by phrase, line by line, fragment by fragment until they were done, then worked on then with Elizabeth Winder my editor for this year, learning the art of using line breaks and the power of concentrating on a concrete image. The poem has been published, the fiction remains on my laptop. Both epics took me past my previous competencies.
What is of interest to me now reviewing this success is how the climate, the place, the permissions I gave to myself to spend a string of days in a certain way – a seemingly desultory lazy way- actually resulted in a good burst of creativity. (And I mean creativity rather than simply plodding productivity.) As Autumn presses in it begs the question: how can I create conditions like this again without the fleeting sun of a British Summer?