Sunday study with B

Studio extension 4
Sunday study with B
Score: 2

Studying with B is serious. She's super smart, intimating even in her blinkered dedication, and she's driven, focused, organised - all the studious words. Because I want her to do well, I try very hard not to bother her, which means that when we are camped out for the day in the dinning room I have no choice but to do but my own work. Sometimes I think to myself "Don't take a break now - you're not being a good role model to her" but then I check myself, remembering that she is most probably like this because she has seen me over many years be driven, consumed and pursuant. It's nice to be in the same space as her, doing our same lonely studies, sharing the isolating experience of learning.

Even if she's not conscious of me,  and even if I am no consolation to her, I appreciate her being not far from me.

Sunday morning.

Studio Extension 3: Bed
Score: 2
A gentle place to work. Familiar and warm from last nights sleep. The world is kept at bay, so life doesn't seep in to distract me. It's no effort to get there and the coffee is great.

At one point in the morning I heard J saying "Time to get your head smashed open." Directed towards a chocolate bunny, his gleeful phrase bounced off the wall and hit me. Writing is a bit head smashing, but if its done in bed, the bits of exploded brain don't fall too far and are softly cushioned by pillows and blankets, and can be fussed together in new combinations through mid morning napping. Im happy here.

Fictious Fantasies and Fact

I had fantasies about the library.

I'd be tucked away in a dark dusty corner of an old world library reading all those seminal texts that you feel obliged to read but can never be sufficiently bothered to read. I would ponder profound ideas, letting my mind open out on to vast planes of new thoughts. Volumes of notes would be complied in moleskine journals as I embarked on the voyage of my Literature Review. In the early evening I'd stare thoughtfully off into the twilight distance of grand possibility. I'd saturate myself in knowledge. Id arise from difficult text suffering and virtuous. I'd be scholarly.

But it turns out learning is not elegant or picturesque. My library hours are spent under the scrutiny of florescent lights, in front of screens, scrolling through electronic databases. The volumes of notes are photocopied and highlighted and marked with colour coded post-it notes and shoved in a wonky metal filing cabinet. But beyond the aesthetic clash of sentimental nostalgia and hard edged modernity, its the activity in my head that is vastly different in reality. It feels like I'm walking around in a fat suit trying to construct thoughts out of unwieldy railway sleepers using an inflatable carnival mallet.

Beginning is awkward.

In the studio my first month has been dominated by a head bloated with the question How?' How will I archive all my research? How does this endnote/wireless/swipecard/Learning management system/email/library catalogue work? How will I make anything in a room which is small enough for me to touch all four walls with all four limbs? How will I make new work in front of others?  How will I cope with the necessary failures of creativity? How can I reconcile the fear of loss when nothing new is happening? How will I let go?

At least the question is 'How?'
It means there is a way.
Or ways.

This week I took on the awkwardness, the how and the ways and experimented with the possibility that my studio was no longer a fixed venue. Based on the Italian translation of studio meaning a place to go and contemplate, I tried to surrender the productive habit of locking myself in the same room everyday all day, in the frugal hope that a change of habit would change the outcome and so I set out on my bike to find thinking places.

I have created a scale for the degree of difficult thinking, reading or writing that each space provides.
1 is extremely difficult, vertigo inducing thinking.
5 is low level glancing, browsing, mulling things over type of thinking.

Studio Extension 1 - Rob's cafe.

Score: 3
Cosy. Friendly. Quiet enough mid morning to spread out my notes. Access to exceptionally good coffee. Its a comfortable place which I could pull a 2 degree of difficulty work-wise, but its very neighbourhoody and the likelhood of bumping into someone I know, and getting distracted are high.

Studio Extension 2 - The Botanical gardens.

Score: 4
After swatting several biting things I spent half an hour combating a persistent breeze that had just enough strength to distract me. I struggled to peg down my skirt, my hair, my piles of papers, let alone a thought in my head. Short articles could be tackled after consulting the weather.

Its a start even if its a stuttering stumble.

The Rationale of the Future whilst Living in the Present

I had some ideas. They were embryonic but urgent. They were the pea that kept me awake. They needed a place to yawp. A place where they wouldn’t insult anyone with their awkward newness, where they could risk being stillborn or nothing or possibly a brave beginning.

And I had a problem – that when you deliberately make temporary work, your only future is speeding towards the radical oblivion of self-erasure. However, the consideration of ongoing access, by a broader audience, over a longer passage of time, is almost a contradictory negotiation. Frequently, transient works of art are returned to objects through various methods of documentation. But documentation - the photograph of a performance, the sketch of an installation, the instructions for actions, are these substitutes ever sufficient and do they occasionally undermine the work?

This combination of artistic unrest and theoretical dissatisfaction, united in a promising new beginning – a practice-based Masters Research, with the grand intention of upgrading to a Ph.D. My rationale was clear, my determination was strong, my practice was ready to shift, getting paid was a bonus, the timing was perfect. The stars were aligned in the formation of a future glittering with wonderful possibility.

The reality of returning to study is, however, …

a story I will tell you.

Drawings for new work