Art always comes back
I’m a firm believer that being an artist is tidal. It’s more complicated than that of course, but it’s the easiest analogy I’ve found to describe how the urge to make things (photo things, art things) rises and falls, swells and retracts, but never really goes away.
For me personally, the years running 2016 - 2020 were photographically pretty creative. I worked in hospitality, on my feet all day, doing repetitive jobs and manual tasks that used a lot of my physical and social energy but not so much of my creative brain. I made things as much as I could around my work pattern (zines, a print series, Fresh Focus at Stills, WORKBOOK, multiple exhibitions) and always felt like I needed more time to make more things and that my head was bursting with ideas I wanted to communicate. This had its own frustrations - the feeling of stretched ‘not-enough-ness’ when your practical schedule forces your creative moments to be condensed or compartmentalised - but I felt this urge to make work and that felt important.
Looking back at things I made then I see definite parallels with my interests today and especially with how my brain seems to tackle things it doesn’t quite understand yet. Same fascination with windows. More self portraits. It’s confident and shouty in a vulnerable way, and I guess it’s like seeing pictures of myself from the same time. Almost 10 years on, I recognise it as me but of course there’s distance. Retrospect allows us to neatly parcel up, and looking back I see the years where making art was important, and I can also see it tail off.
I became self-employed in Digital Communications approximately 5-months before the Covid-19 pandemic, and therefore did not qualify for governmental self-employed support. Cue lots of phone calls and lots of form-filling and stress. As lockdown lengthened however it also presented an opportunity as digital support was needed more desperately than ever. So after that initial vacuum, from 2020-2022 my focus was building my experience and reputation as a freelancer that people wanted to work with again and again. The day-to-day of ‘comms’ is creative but people rarely seem to speak about that: I spent hours writing copy and designing assets for clients, editing video, animating text, creating graphics, consuming so much media. It may be changing now with AI, but at that time at least, all of those online communications were someone’s voice, someone’s creative.
Then in 2022 we opened AGITATE and it's been a joy: tumultuous, challenging, and of course one very particularly difficult year, but it’s probably the thing I am most proud of because I know how much energy and trust it took. And that is a making force. To some degree that all came from the creative brain, it went into every exhibition installed, every instagram post I hoped would reach new photo folks, into every early mailer update and houseplant potted and window sign written, every customer chatted-to and vague idea that made its way into an in-person event, every introduction of person to person and the space made for something to grow between them. All that work was pouring from my creative cup. You know that analogy? The three cups - you’re in control of what they are, you get to decide what your priorities are, and then you split your energy between them. Well, there’s only so much juice at the end of the day. So in terms of my own art, and my own personal ‘practice’, the creative tide was low. It had to be low. And that’s ok.
I was quite relaxed about this, I think. I remember conversations in the first year of running AGITATE where, as a team, we discussed the frustration with not having the time and energy to make our own work, and the worry it would always be that way. For whatever reason, in spite of my generally anxious tendencies, this was the one thing that I actually didn’t feel stressed about. Somehow I trusted that the role as ‘artist’ was tidal - crucially, that it would come back - and that gradually I would find a way to make meaningful time and space for making, for me, whenever the time was right.
So what was all this retrospect for? I guess in a broad sense I intended this as a celebration of ‘making’ - both as an artist but also to recognise the low tide years when the harbour is empty. I have read a few times that a ‘real artist never stops creating’ and in some ways I agree; but that doesn’t mean you’re making endless exhibitions and books and prize-winning photographs consistently, as social media can definitely make it seem. That making force could be being poured into five other things, or healing something, or creating space for others to feel inspired. I hope that by reading this anyone feeling stuck in a creative slump finds some comfort. At the risk of stretching this metaphor too thin - there’s no point trying to sail a boat when the harbour is empty. Without the tide you’re just scraping wood on rocks and risk breaking something in the process. A little faith. A little time. It’ll come back, just like the waves always do, I believe it.
What makes all this harder is that a lot of us feel lazy for not making art non-stop. If we hark back to that dogged myth of the tormented artist we often picture a solitary man smoking cigarettes saying he’s penniless, maybe missing an ear, woe is me, painting a masterpiece in an attic somewhere that will lie undiscovered until after his demise. We picture someone with nothing at all to do but make their art and for some reason we make this the goal. Can you imagine how lonely and boring the world would be if we were all like this? I don’t believe many people actually live like this, indefinitely, and honestly I’m not sure why we would want to. But it’s also not practical.
Artists today are multi-taskers because they have to be. They live in a web of priorities with many things syphoning energy in different ways. Something that doesn’t look like an ‘artist’s way of life’ in the cigarette/attic/art-from-isolation sense may be the thing you’re giving that juice to. Building a community? Decorating a house? Designing a website? Going to therapy, even? All of this, to me, stems from the same part of the brain, the little imagination bridge that looks first inwards and then goes back out and tries to make something new. A conjuring. And all of this making in all these not-yet-mythicised forms takes a chunk of your creative will. All we can do as artists with complicated responsibilities is try to be aware of where our energy is going and whether it’s worth it - there’s more to life than art after all, but not if it’s the one thing you long to do.
But I’ve strayed far away from what I thought was the point here.
The point was to celebrate making photography, in its broadest sense, with the context that for me it’s been a hot minute. I feel in some ways I’ve done the opposite, I’ve really talked mainly about that pause from ‘practice’ in which still so much was made. But it’s interesting now to notice how different it feels making work compared to 2016-20. I felt an urgency then to connect, I wanted share something of myself. Everything felt a bit raw and I wanted things to change, as quickly as possible. Now with my camera I’m looking outward, more curious, more cautious when looking in. It’s odd coming back to something that, at least in the first stages, is entirely for me. What an indulgence it feels to think about something (wonder); give something attention (care); and put time into trying to make it glorious (love). There’s nobody grading this, there’s nobody else to please, this isn’t for a client, it’s not about selling tickets or building a reputation or being perfect at all. It’s wonder, care and love, all guided by curiosity, and that’s equal parts liberating and scary.
So I’m excited / terrified to be faced again with time to sit with an empty page and I’m recognising that tugging feeling that makes me anxious to get back to my photographs. To see things and want to freeze them, want to learn everything about them. Perhaps it should be embarrassing but I find myself tingling all over taking two frames of the same leaf against the sky (wee scans above). It feels audacious. It also feels silly. What a treasure. And because of the structures that we’ve built in between, because of the AGITATE community borne in part from the low tide years, nourished and eked out by the creative energy diverted into something other, I know that when I have made something I’m proud of I have a network of support within which to share it. Low tide wasn’t for nothing. Creating is never futile and care is never wasted. If you wait patiently and trust that it will, that need to make art will always come back.
