This Scraps, a monthly (ish, sorry!!) subscriber essay series.
Illustration by Ben McDonald
I’m currently attending workshops and group sessions as part of the first Artist Writing Forum at Flatland Projects, an art gallery in Bexhill. It’s been an illuminating and enriching experience; sessions around writing manifestos and dialogues between artworks with Jen Calleja and some hard work around prompts and drafting with Claire Ratinon. Most of the people in the group are visual artists of some kind: painters, sculptors, something in between or all of the above. To begin with, when people asked me about my work I felt a bit evasive and embarrassed. I don’t call myself an artist but I think I would probably like to. For one thing, I believe that art and creativity is inherent as an expression of human nature, not exclusive to people with certain skills or aptitude and also I think a lot (though not all of my work) has artistic intention (if not merit lolol).
In my expression of interest to take part in the forum I wrote: “Recently I have been thinking a lot about both the legacy and accessibility of audio-based work and the idea of a potential obsolescence as so many listening formats have fallen out of use so rapidly in recent years. And so I have become very interested in bringing writing in as a more significant part of my work, as I am curious to see whether using this form to explore ideas I would usually approach in audio form can help me address some of these queries. I am also really excited to try and understand whether the approach I would habitually take to record audio for pieces (ie, thinking about how sound can create a vivid portrait of the environment in which the idea is being explored) could be applicable to creating written work instead.”
This exploration has unfolded in a slightly unexpected way. I do a lot of writing as part of my audio work but it’s not intended to stay in physical written form. The writing itself is temporary, transient; I write for voice, and mostly my own. I hadn’t really thought about the implications of this until a sharing session a few weeks ago when someone pointed out that I, the I, felt very present in the writing, mostly because of sentence construction I had included where I was talking about my feelings and politics. I realised that I had got in the habit of writing a certain way because of how I express myself out loud, and because I know people will be listening to me rather than reading me. My immediate reaction to this was obviously, oh this is bad, but the group reassured me that it was neither good nor bad, simply an observation.
I’m sharing the piece I wrote for sharing here, for reasons I will explain more fully afterwards, and I hope you like it. It’s about one of my favourite paintings in the world, Lubaina Himid’s Slice Ten Lemons (up to you whether you look at this before or after or at all, if you haven’t seen it before!)
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