the best is yet to come.

dispatch from bed <3

Hi, my name is Angelica and I’m an artist. Art does for me what I’m sure it does for many of you - it enriches my life, and gives it dimension and clarity. I’m referring to both making it and enjoying it as an “audience member”. But let me for one moment focus on the making part.

What it comes to making art, I do not consider it hyperbole to say that it helps me to survive. My practice is intrinsically linked to my sense-making as well as my self-soothing. For four years none of my work was public. As this newsletter grew and morphed into BLOOM! it did so alongside my creative practice becoming more public.

I consider my practice (this includes all forms of art making, including music) to oscillate between private, private-public and public. I think these differences are important to distinguish when it is such a vital life force for me, as I’m sure it is for many of you reading.

Creating my website last year was a really important step for me in making public part of my creative ecosystem. If you’re new or you haven’t seen it, click here.

(My website/ Public Creative Ecosystem was also recently praised and shared here in this article, alongside my music video ~move~!)

Having this website gives me a sense of autonomy as an artist. It also helps me not to feel so precious about my work. Which is strange given a website is traditionally quite a formal thing. But I find a platform like Instagram actually necessitates more polish, more product (and less process) than a website.

One of my favourite pieces I made during these four private years was this.

It’s an oil painting I originally worked on (birthed if you will) back when I had a studio in Hackney Wick. I slashed through it in a moment of rage, contained some of the brushstrokes in black and subsequently left it for some time in that state. Then a year or so after, in my home studio, I sewed up each slash with ribbon. I also created grommet holes for the ribbon to thread through. I love this work.

You see, for pretty much my whole life, I’ve endured a number of setbacks, or as I occasionally (and in an understating fashion!) refer to them - a series of unfortunate events - that I have attempted to unentangle, assuage, clarify and remedy through art. This piece, part-textile part-painting, is one of such artworks.

And I believe my best work is to come - is in front of me. If you’re here, you’re here for the ride, the journey. (Hi! It’s great to have you here.)

I turned to music at one point (although it feels like a series of points) because visual art failed to facilitate the communication I so desperately craved. I needed song, lyrics, melody. Not shape and line (although a line is a line is a line).

For me music is part of my whole practice. For some time, I faintly modelled myself after various singer-songwriters I met in London, failing to keep up, to perform as they performed. My music was art, was soul. I wasn’t a folk singer!! Although I do love to wear a cool cap and vintage threads.

So, realising this, I embraced my limitations. I created a music video over a series of months, working mainly from home, sometimes from bed, and when I felt energised enough we (a friend and I) filmed in the woods.

I realised what I wanted to communicate through music was in the same world as the art practice and the ecosystem I developed in my one year at art school. It also had a home in some of the literary worlds I was introduced to at Cambridge (although I really hated my degree and felt like a dying fish out of water, if you hadn’t heard me say that already, even without the glandular fever turned chronic fatigue syndrome and horrifying stress and undiagnosed childhood trauma and assault.)

Now, when I work from my home studio, I feel like I’m world-building, even if I don’t quite know what it means yet. Am I building a home within a home? Am I envisioning new systems for my local community, or the wider world? Am I facilitating change through praxis? Am I healing?

I’m still living in these questions. One at a time. And you’re here with me, reading this, witnessing it. That is a gift.

I have recently established a section for my newsletter just for audio. I plan to dispatch a podcast/ audio episode in a couple of days so look out for that. If you’re subscribed here, you’ll receive it!

How are you navigating the ebbs and flows of your life, or creative practice? Are you interested in the act of creation as a lifelong path? Do you feel like there are obstacles in your life you might make art about?

I love considering all the different ways art and life are entangled.

I think of a flourishing creative practice as a blooming garden/ a garden in bloom. I think there’s a nod to that in the title of my newsletter, and maybe some inherent wish-fulfilment there.

I’m currently focussed on my livelihood and my developing health treatments. I’ve been playing guitar a little, and dreaming up different avenues for the BANSHEE project.

I’d also love to facilitate some workshops this summer, and have been jotting down all the ideas I have in my sketchbook! So let’s see.

I’m writing this from my phone today, so forgive any formatting errors please :)

There are probably things I’ve forgotten to mention but that’s what the next newsletter is for.

Greetings and blessings from my home studio.

All the best to you dear reader!

Angelica xoxo