Everything hurts. Knees, back, hips, wrists, elbows. Osteoarthritis hurts. So far this morning I have spilled a cup of coffee, kicked over a plant pot, and failed to do my knee exercises because the rest of my leg won’t let me. My body isn’t working today. I can rage about it; I can try to work within it.
When I was at the University of Worcester in March I mentioned in my lecture - as an afterthought - that physicality has an impact on creativity. I said, at the time, that I hadn’t worked out my thoughts on this yet - and I still haven’t, but as I am feeling this very much today, here are some early musings.
At my exhibition in the Hive, there was a piece on display that had been limited creatively by physical limitations, and I have been putting off doing anything about it - but a month on, I know I need to start on sorting out the various issues.
It’s a portrait of Thomas Cromwell himself. He gave me a lot of trouble from the start - refusing to be sketched out full face, insisting on being shown in profile, causing problems with edging. But the portrait was finished just in time, the night before I travelled to Worcester, ready for hanging.
Except he wasn’t. When he was hanging, all I could see was sag - there wasn’t enough stitch in the piece. I disguised this somewhat by hanging some of the Letters to Cromwell over the left hand side of the piece, but all week, the sagging bothered me.
How did this happen?
A month after the exhibition I can see the sequence of events more clearly. I was stitching to a deadline (never a good idea). My body doesn’t like that. I decided to include a lot of Cromwell’s various titles to edge the piece, but the first attempt (ink on calico strips) didn’t satisfy me, so I had to do a fair amount of unpicking. During said unpicking, some of the layering became too loose, and I didn’t take the time to check for sagging. My wrists were starting to ache and I wasn’t able to add sufficient stability in the background stitching - and it would have taken another couple of weeks to fix this.
My desire to include Cromwell in the exhibition overcame my awareness that he wasn’t ready. And some of this was about not wanting my body to dictate what was possible - but ignoring physicality is perilous.
So what now?
I could leave him alone and insist that he’s finished. I suspect that it’s only me who would notice the sag - or perhaps others are too polite to point it out unless I insist on drawing attention to it - but Master Secretary deserves better. He is the main focus of my work after all. There’s nothing for it but to quilt in more texture, unpick most of the edging, rethink the lettering, and restitch. And take as much time as he takes.
This piece was going to discuss how one knows a piece of work is finished (or not) but as I am still gathering my thoughts on that, I wanted to write briefly about a documentary that I have found really interesting from a creative practice point of view.
In about quarter of an hour, I will turn on a live stream from Seoul, South Korea, and watch the third of BTS’ world tour opening dates at Goyang Stadium. Their first performance on Thursday took place in torrential rain - members, crew, dancers, audience, security all soaked to the skin, with water standing inches deep on the stage. Not what anyone would have wanted - they could have cancelled - but they still delivered an astonishing show.
To accompany the tour and their new album Arirang, the band has participated in a behind-the-scenes documentary which shows some of the creative process behind the recording.
I try to avoid online social media chat about BTS, but I did see one complaint about the documentary that really annoyed me: that the members weren’t “having fun” making the album. Creative work is hard, whoever you are, and to be those seven hardworking and talented young men, coming together after more than three years apart doing their mandatory military service, trying to balance their individual preferences, negotiating solutions, striving to meet both commercial and critical expectations, navigating guidance from their company management, choosing language - Korean or English?, knowing they will receive negative online commentary whatever they do - and to performatively “have fun” at the same time - is unimaginable. That they can manage this with such good grace and generosity after 13 years together while maintaining strong personal and professional relationships is extraordinary.
“No such thing as failure, it’s all part of the process’” says Park Jimin (in Korean to English translation), after a session listening to the Korean folk song Arirang. “If it were easy, everybody would be cranking this out,” says Kim Namjoon, during the recording of Swim.
And I could learn a valuable lesson from Min Yoongi:
In the past we would grind away in the studio until the song was finished. Our process felt more painful back then. Now, if a song doesn’t come out, it doesn’t. I just get through it. I’m better now at just sitting with it and that old impatience is gone.
Don’t be impatient. Don’t try to overrule physicality. Sit with the process, and don’t grind away until a piece is (not) finished.
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