This is a post for my paid subscribers, with a preview for everyone. If you enjoy my writing please consider upgrading your subscription for £4/month or £40/year. These mean a lot to me as I try and maintain an independent creative life. You can cancel at any time though I always appreciate your commitment over time, as I offer mine to you. My most recent book is Weathering on geology and therapy. My first book Grounded is an illustrated guide to nature connectedness. I also have a new multi-disciplinary art chapbook called CONDUIT available now in hardcopy and digital version. Thank you for your continued support, friends. It means the world to me.
My shop is now closed while I’m away but you can support my work by grabbing a digital chapbook:
It’s like being in a different world, or more accurately, a suspended reality. In such a short time, my daily life has become this valley, my studio apartment and the six other people here. The outside world, its news and general saturation feels like a theoretical place far away. I wake to the village church bells at around 7, I open my third floor shutters, which flushes the swifts nesting in the eaves right above me, and I see blue sky above the deeply forested dolomite mountains. I decide on a different schedule each day, but it is always variations on a theme – at some point I will walk, I will swim, I will take photographs and I will write.
I have a neighbour back home who asks me all the time what are you doing today? I say thinking. He looks at me fondly, but like I’m a foreign object and says that he tries to never think. I say it’s my business and that people are always interrupting my thinking time with a cheeky smile. And so it goes on. But here, I get a lot of thinking time. It is a version of heaven that I have slipped into, and I’m amazed daily that this world exists and I never knew about it.
Of course, I miss home in so far as it is my home and my people are waiting for me, messaging me and sending me photos and videos of Juno. But I know I’ll be back soon, and so for this period of time I can live in a sort of fantasy where the chores generated by one person in an uncarpeted apartment are light, enabling me to work (by which I really mean hang around in the mountains and think) from waking to sleeping, with minimal interruption. If I have any complaint, then it’s not about the oven being a gas hazard or the heat which makes time ooze by too quickly and often unnoticed, but about the predictability of my own thoughts. Reality may be suspended, but it’s still the same familiar me rushing through it.
With all of this perfect opportunity it’s hard not to put pressure on myself to find some new or undiscovered part of myself; perhaps I have been harbouring a hope that unencumbered by day-to-day life back home I will realise my own latent potential for making exciting work, fast and prolifically. Maybe I thought I would start a novel. Maybe I would write a collection of poems. In reality however, I am having the same ideas. They just get a chance to grow into a larger space. I have not started a book and only written one poem. Instead, I stubbornly find myself over and over albeit at greater ease, more focused, sweatier. But that’s not to say that the Italian sun isn’t melting something else more deeply. I do already feel more confident to situate some of this work as art. One of the great joys of the last week has been working with a fellow Fellow, Monica, who has modelled for me as I attempt to bring an idea (‘Refuge’) to life through the lens.
I know myself as a writer, and so when I sit down to write and see the same self thinking on the page then I am unsurprised, maybe even uninspired. But when I start taking photographs I feel newer and more interesting to myself, even if just for a moment. The photos I’m creating (and that feels like a change from ‘taking’ – which doesn’t really capture the process) are a direct continuation from my time on Etna last year making Conduit. But they are also, I think, part of the lineage with my short film ‘Everything Happens for a Season’ that we showed at Kendal Film Festival the year before, and even from my Estonia project, which has yet to be finished. And from the many hundreds of photos I have been taking of rocks over the last few years, which feel like the Common Ancestor of it all. There is an absurdity' to these new photos I have been creating this week (which I will share another time), both in terms of the ideation itself and the process and performance of them. They are surreal, dreamlike and in places eerie. Many are imbued with a sort of melancholy, I realise. The ones I like the most, I see myself in most clearly.
At some point last week, I had a realisation as I sat talking with the other residents here: that book writing has made me deeply attuned to the commercial (this bit was not a surprise) and that while this is fine, it has been getting in the way of relaxing into making work that is a bit more conceptual and ‘artistic’. No one around the table was worrying about who would anoint their work as successful. No one was thinking of mass appeal. If any of them were worrying what the financial outcome from their time on residency would be, they weren’t letting on. They are just doing the work they feel compelled to make. Perhaps there is privilege in that, perhaps that’s just what artists are conditioned towards. Either way, anxiety levels seem very low. If it’s true that we should steal like an artist then I am stealing this ambivalence, or is it nonchalance, towards a particular sort of commercial outcome. This was a strange realisation, because haven’t I been moving in this direction over the last couple of years anyway? Wasn’t I given a grant to be here in recognition of my odd hybridity? I guess the difference is that I have been fighting myself the whole way. It is helpful to remember that we always breathe the air in front of us: so if you want to know how artists think, go to where the artists go. I am terrible for looking in the opposite direction to my feet.
{the rest of this post is behind a paywall because it contains personal/sensitive information}
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