It's the end of a really busy time for me working on other projects. We have finished our Poly-math artist development program of work and I've rounded off a number of other independent bits of work. So after completing some long neglected decorating tasks, I have real time to focus on the ACE funded 'Taking the Lead" project. It's felt like the normal roller-coaster of projects falling on top of each other, underpinned by loading the car up with a massive projector and driving across the North of England and shining lights onto buildings.
I should feel really pleased to be in this position, to focus on something, but I know myself better than that. Whilst in the middle of sorting out other peoples problems it's much easier to forget some of your own. It's often easier to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear than a silk purse out of a Silkworm. I hope that's a mixed metaphor but put simply, (I was listing to Radio Four yesterday and someone from the Bank of England said that they needed to make public statements simpler "Something bad is coming" was the Dr Schulz simplification of most of their recent rhetoric). When you get a chance to do what most artists would call "your own work" it then becomes clear what your own work is, in all it's glorious limitations.
Yet here we are, from now until I start to look for something else, I have time to think and work on what it means to produce art. This will certainly let me down, making me feel sad and empty by how vacuous and trivial the things I'm actually interested in are. The corner of a plate glass window as it catches the winter light, the patina in painted cast iron, the piece of shiny paper with the date written and then erased in the top left hand corner. My daughter Alice has just started art foundation, she is drawing cabbages with a pencil on the end of a stick - cabbages feature in lots of paintings, they are a symbol for art and ordinariness, yet everything is a symbol of something. It struck me that we have an opportunity to put our money where our mouths are, to really see if we can do something useful - as Lewis Carol says through the looking glass of Alice's namesake:
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
So off we go, the clock is ticking, the space is opening up and art as in nature abhors a vacuum. The words of the artists from HG Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come" spring to mind.
"This modern world is full of voices - I'm a Master Craftsman I have the right to speak.
Yes, but will they listen?
If I shout , 'Arise, awake. Stop this progress before it is to late', they will listen"
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