Studio Notes September. Looking Backwards.
A little update from the studio
I’ve been doing something a little different in the studio lately.
Instead of making new work, I’ve been going backwards.
I’ve been working on my archive — going through decades of paintings, drawings, collage, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photographs, video, writing, poetry… and quite a lot of things I had completely forgotten about.
It turns out I have made rather a lot of stuff.
What started as a fairly sensible idea of I’ll just organise my old work, has turned into a much bigger undertaking. There are boxes to open, photographs to scan, dates to work out, old notes to decipher and lots of moments of I remember this!
And then there is the problem of deciding what belongs in the archive.
Which, as it turns out, is not nearly as straightforward as I thought.
I keep finding connections between things made years apart. A material I was experimenting with in one period suddenly appears again much later. An idea I thought was new has actually been quietly sitting in my work for years. Sometimes I find myself looking at something from decades ago and thinking … I can see where that was heading now.
It has made me look at my practice differently.
For so long, I just moved from one piece of work to the next — following whatever interested me at the time, and often responding to the next exhibition or show that was coming up. I was busy making the work, rather than stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.
I didn't necessarily see the connections through the years but the archive is beginning to show me that all those different directions aren't quite as disconnected as they sometimes seemed. There are threads running through the work that I couldn't see while I was busy making it. So, for now, I’m still digging.
Some days it feels fascinating. Some days it feels like an enormous archaeological excavation of my own life. And occasionally I wonder why I ever started.
But I’m glad I did.
I’m not quite ready to launch the Archive just yet as I want to spend a little more time with it and let it unfold rather than rushing it out the door as there is still quite a bit to uncover.