When I was about 15, I went to a school fancy dress party as Cleopatra. In a long halterneck dress that tied at the back of the neck.

And I wore it without a bra because I wasn’t very well-endowed at the time and besides, I didn’t own a backless bra.

And I did that thing that you should never do when you are wearing a halterneck dress without a bra and are slow-dancing with teenage boys. I tied it in a bow, instead of a ninja death knot with 15 safety pins.

Aaaaannnnddddd I think you can see where this story is going, yes?

I danced for several minutes before I realised that everyone was pointing and laughing hysterically. And I wondered why. And then I looked down.

People, I am here to tell you that you cannot, in fact, die of embarrassment. You can certainly WISH that you could die of embarrassment but you will not die just because everyone laughs at you.

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Which is why you’ll find me immortalised on the sweet and funny ‘Fearless Karaoke’ video that Natalie Peluso made to launch her new site, Sing Your Truth. I’m the one making flirty eyes at the camera.

Yep, I jumped in and videoed myself singing. Even though I was just getting over a sore throat. Even though my honey forgot to tell me that the headphones he lent me were noise-cancelling ones, so I couldn’t hear my own voice and it turns out that’s Not A Good Thing when you’re singing (many thanks to Natalie for using some of my more tuneful bits in the video). Even though singing in public is nerve-racking.

But I did it anyway because let’s face it, once you’ve accidentally flashed your entire school as a teenager*, everything else kind of pales into insignificance, even singing badly on the internet.

Kudos to my fellow fearless karaoke-ers and huge big congratulations to Natalie – I know the site is going to be just fantastic. If you don’t already know Natalie’s previous writing on The Tiny Soprano, you should go over and check out her archives, there’s lots of great stuff about motivation, money and fearlessness.

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*This isn’t even the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me, although it is pretty high up the list.**

**You know what makes this story even more embarrassing? It was only when I was typing this out that it occurred to me that my dress probably hadn’t fallen down by accident. Sigh. I am slow sometimes.

OK, lovelies, dare you share? Let’s have your thoughts on the scary power of embarrassment in the comments. Or you can compliment me on my fine singing voice – I am entirely open to flattery, even if you’re lying.

A three minute video I made about the importance of bravery.

Inspired by Natalie, The Tiny Soprano and her soon-to-launch site, Sing Your Truth.

Sadly the lovely people at Make & Meaning have decided to call it a day, so I’m going to be reprinting the two guest articles I wrote for them. Here’s the first one:

The Wisdom Of Mistakes

Image by Orin Zebest, via Flickr

An artist who is afraid to make mistakes is an artist who is stuck.

I used to volunteer to teach art at a local primary school. Sadly, by the age of 10, the majority of children had already slipped so far into perfectionism that their ability to make art was suffering. They had a very clear peeking order of who was good at art and who wasn’t and their definition of what constituted ‘being good at art’ seemed to revolve around not making mistakes.

So I devised a little exercise.

I asked them to paint a quick, colourful picture and while it was drying, I led a class discussion. I asked them whether they thought artists made mistakes? They universally agreed that if you were an artist that meant you didn’t make many mistakes and the better you were, the fewer mistakes you would make. I explained that, in fact, the very opposite was true and that someone who wasn’t willing to make mistakes wouldn’t be a very good artist. I explained that ALL artists constantly made mistakes but that they simply saw mistakes as potential opportunities.

Then, I asked them to tear up their paintings.

Image by milomingo, via Flickr

They stared at me in horror and disbelief. ‘Rip them up’, I urged, ‘rip them up!’ Clearly still believing they would get into trouble, a few of the braver ones made tentative little rips. ‘That’s brilliant, do more’, I encouraged. Suddenly most of the class understood that they really did have permission to destroy their work and things dissolved into gleeful giggles and wild tearing. After several minutes of creative mayhem, I asked them to stop, take a few minutes to calm down and then to re-examine their pile of torn paper with a view to transforming it into a collage. The collages weren’t anything to write home about but it’s still the art lesson of which I’m proudest and in an age of constant exams and teaching to the test, I hope it stuck with at least a few of them.

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”  ~Scott Adams

Imperfection can be the pathfinder that leads us to new places IF we are willing to let go of our ego and put our trust in the wisdom of the work.

New techniques, new directions, new ideas; mistakes open up so many possibilities.

Image by pygment_shots, via Flickr

That tricky yarn that just refuses to work with any knitting pattern – what is it trying to teach you? Patience? Not to buy that colour combination again? Or is it challenging you to come up with a new stitch pattern that will make the most of its variegated repeats?

Is the ceramic glaze that bubbles in the kiln and ‘spoils’ the pot really a disaster? Or can you repeat and refine the process until you no longer have ‘a mistake’ but a unique signature style? What sort of surface are you left with if you sand back the bubbled glaze? Or if you crack the bubbles lightly with a hammer, add another layer of glaze and refire? Can you think of ten different things to try with your ‘ruined’ pot?

The painting that went wrong might lead you to a whole new series of work if you listen to what its telling you.

Ruined pieces often lead to new directions because there’s nothing left to lose. You’ve already used the materials and many of them can’t be reclaimed: the ink won’t go back into the bottle, the paper will never be pristine again. So why not let loose with some wild experimentation – rip it up, overdye it, splash bleach on, paint over it in gesso, turn it inside out and sew beads on it! Baring freakishly bizarre crafting accidents, what’s the worst that can happen? You were going to throw it out anyway.

Image by LittleLexxis, via Flickr

Of course, all artists and craftspeople have their irredeemable failures that are fit only for the bin. The idea that seemed so great inside your head but wasn’t; the new technique that drove you up the wall; the brave attempt that was too far beyond your current skill level: our studios are stuffed with them!

But even these poor ugly objects have value. They were steps along your journey and they may have taught you far more than the pieces that went well.

Perhaps their only message is, ‘hmm, I don’t think woodworking is my thing’. But that is a very valuable lesson: now you have one less craft to master while you search for your ‘right thing’.

Or the lesson might be, “I am bad at this now but I enjoyed the process so much that I’m willing to invest the time, money and energy needed to become better.” And the second lesson might be, “so I shall keep this failed thing and in a year I’ll be able to see how far I’ve come.”

Image by carpocrates, via Flickr

“Creative people make a mess, clean it up and make another mess. There are no mistakes in art only happy little accidents.”  ~Timothy Leonard

So drag out one of your failures (come on, I know you’ve got at least one lurking!) and challenge yourself to see it with fresh enquiring eyes.

Even if it can’t be reworked, experimented with or recycled, hold it in your hands and ask it what it can teach you. Ask yourself why it didn’t work. Try to find some tiny part of it that did work, even if the whole thing is a failure. A particular piece may be beyond saving but it could still hold the answers to your current creative dilemmas.

Don’t listen to your inner critic, listen to the work. What subtle whispers have you ignored because your ego got in the way, loudly declared, ‘that’s rubbish’ and tossed the thing in the corner in disgust?

An artist humble enough to learn from their mistakes is an artist who is moving forwards.

What have you learnt from mistakes and failures? Tell me in the comments…

Gossiping Ducks by foxypar4

Sometimes I have to slide sideways into things. Or trick myself into starting by making projects smaller than they truly are.

I am cursed with perfectionism, so often the only way forward is to just close my eyes and jump.

Which is how I found myself opening an online shop for my art. Without branding. Without a big launch. Without having all my drawings scanned and ready to go. Without enough mounts or packaging materials. With all my ducks decidedly not in anything even vaguely resembling a row. In fact, I’m not entirely sure where my pond is and it’s quite likely that all my ducks have flown off in a huff.

But I started anyway.

There’s not much in my shop yet (see aforementioned lack of ducks) but I’m adding things as I go along. It’s also possible that my pricing is entirely wrong but I decided that fear of pricing was a lousy reason not to start something.

And I have no idea if this is going to work.

I’ve already sold two envelopes (yay!) but maybe no one else will ever buy anything. You’d think that this would be a source of stress, that I would be filled with the fear of rejection. But weirdly, it doesn’t seem to matter and that’s because I just jumped. Without too much preparation or angst or investment of time, energy, money or emotion.

Sure, it would be fabulous if I make a gazillion pounds selling art online – don’t get me wrong, I absolutely want this to succeed – but I’m also very clear that it’s a test piece, a maquette, an experiment.

See, that’s the great thing about the internet – the cost of entry is low. I don’t have to spend lots of money ‘setting up a business’, I can just say, ‘hey, let’s throw a few quid at an online store for six months and see if it works?’ If it doesn’t, well, no harm, no foul and I’ll have learnt some useful stuff. I’m hugely interested in trying new things online. At the moment it still feels as though there’s a lot of freedom on the web; that maybe I can do things in my own strange, messed up way and still make a go of it. That maybe all those ducks aren’t quite as important as people tell you.

Our local synchronized swimming team by Eric Bégin

Because I think I can do this, but not if I have to get my ducks in order first. My ducks are recalcitrant, they fly away when they’re told to line up, they quack in a rebellious manner, they flaunt their sassy little ducktails like 50’s rockers. And when I wring my hands about business-type things, they make rude and unhelpful Donald Duck noises. My ducks have ATTITUDE.

In the Swim by StarrGazr

Now I’m not saying that you should make a half-arsed job of things. If you’re the sort of person who can easily organise your ducks, that’s absolutely great – you’ve got a huge advantage and you should use it to the full. What I am saying is that for perfectionists, the perceived need to get all our ducks in a row before we start anything can be a very effective stalling technique. It can be an excuse. And sometimes you have to be braver than that.

So I’ve learnt to pointedly ignore my ducks and then quietly organise them into rows when they’re not looking.

How do you deal with your ducks? Let me know in the comments…

“Art is beautiful but it is hard, like a religion without a purpose.”
Gunter Brus

Kirsty Hall: Performing Pin Ritual, Dec 2003

People who aren’t working in a creative profession often think that what we do is easy, fun, glamorous or exciting. And it can be all of those things. But it’s also a time-consuming, brain-melting obsession that will eat your life.

It is not ‘five minutes, boom, you’re done, sit back and drink a martini’ – that is not how the creative process goes for even the most talented people. Techniques take time to learn and perfect. You make mistakes. Then you make bigger mistakes and have to start over. Even once you’ve learnt your craft, it’s twisty: you fret, you fiddle and things go wrong. You can pick away at a problem for months or years with no guarantee that you’ll ever crack it.

Sure, some people make it look easy but I’d bet my granny’s pension that they’re working hard when your back is turned. They’re dreaming their way into a role; they’re thinking about their sculpture on their lunch break; they’re drawing for hours every day.

So you need to enjoy the process of what you do. Because that’s what you’re going to be doing all day.

Kirsty Hall: Red thread and needle, May 2008

If you plan to make hats for a living, you’d better love plittering around with felt and feathers. If you’re going to carve wood, you’d better not be allergic to sawdust. If you want to act, you’d better be able to put up with hanging out with other actors, learning lines and spending lots of time waiting around.

Now, obviously no one loves every single thing about their job but if you dislike most of your process, then you’re in the wrong creative field or are using the wrong medium.

I know this sounds stupid but I see a lot of young artists making this mistake. They’re naturally great at video but instead try to make sculptures because they feel they ‘should’. Or they have a talent for colour but feel guilty that it’s ‘too easy’, so they chose to work in monochrome even through they secretly long to pick up that tube of orange.

If you call yourself an artist but find yourself making excuses to write instead of making art, you might really be a writer. If you find oils endlessly frustrating but make watercolours for fun on your days off, you may be using the wrong kind of paint. If you hate having clay under your fingernails, making pots is not for you.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t challenge yourself by exploring new areas. Nor am I saying that everything needs to be easy – it won’t be. I’m saying that you absolutely must have a deep and abiding love for the actual processes of your craft. You need to be able to think, “Oh wow, sewing sequins on this apron is still kind of great, even through I’ve been doing it for a year & I’m kind of bored now”.

Kirsty Hall: Close up of sequins, Oct 2009

Because a lot of the time you will be frustrated, stuck or thoroughly fed up and in my experience, if you don’t have that core passion for your daily reality, then you will quit.

I am in the midst of a rather intense CFS crash & can’t concentrate on writing. I was stressing out about tumbleweeds blowing through the blog, when I thought ‘wait a minute, I’ve got tons of old writing I could reuse’. So here’s a slightly edited piece from my college years. It seemed apt to publish a piece about Still Life at a time when my life is essentially standing still.

Still Life – written 1st July 2001

I have come to realise that much of what I make is actually Still Life. My photographs, in particular, definitely have a Still Life sensibility. I am looking at small things, like hot raspberries on the beach or the reflection in a bowl of water and saying that they are small, yet very important.

Kirsty Hall: Salt Bowl Reflection, May 2006

It seems to me that that is what most Still Lives do: they take things and set them apart. Still Life demands that we really look at the flagon of wine and the apple, or the bowl of cherries, or the lifeless carcasses. It ponders the flowers, the glass and the tablecloth. It makes us see the texture of everyday life and forces the realisation that actually these things are amazing. The bread we eat, the soft cheese, the pile of fruit, the luscious cakes, the humble or grand spread. This is what keeps us alive after all. This is what nourishes us.

Kirsty Hall: Bread, cheese & sun-dried tomato, Dec 2008

Of course, we also need vast epic pictures of the imagination and portraits that force us to look at our frail human bodies. We need art to consider many things. But it seems sad to me that Still Life should so long have been considered to be the least important subject when it also deals with life and death. To me, mortality seems a vital component of many Still Lives. Those flowers will soon be dead: they are just caught for a moment in time. Caught at the point of perfection? Or perhaps already weeping their petals onto the rough-hewn table or perfect lace. That food will spoil or be devoured by a hoard of hungry mouths. Even that fine glass goblet will eventually be broken or lost. The table itself will be consumed by history. Who knows what happened to the musical instruments, the sheet music or the pile of books? They are lost to us except for the contained, still, captured image.

Kirsty Hall: Dead Tulip, Feb 2008

It is that quality of stillness that I love about Still Life. More and more my work has been edging towards stillness; not actual silence but definitely quietness. I think I am looking for contemplation and the mysterious void. Stillness is a quality that I associate strongly with the colour white, which is perhaps why my work has contained so much paleness in the last two years. I am searching for that perfect moment perhaps, that moment of clarity and stillness?

I have an art school monster. It lives in my head. It feeds on my fears and starts nasty little rumours.

Image by autumn_bliss, used under Creative Commons license

Maybe my monster was there before art school, a cute little baby monster perhaps? But art school gave it shape and helped it grow. Art school gave it the words to wound me.

I had a great and challenging time at art school. I learnt a lot and grew immensely. I met amazing people, had fantastic experiences, drank a huge amount of tea and worked extremely hard.

I wouldn’t give up that time for anything – but it did leave behind a few scars and a monster. And boy is it hard to create when you have a whispering monster taking up space in your studio!

Right now my monster is telling me that creating with fabric is a stupid thing to do. A girly thing. An embarrassing thing. Even though I love fabric, fibre and thread and adore the work that other artists make with it, my monster says that people will think I’m rubbish if I use it. Not serious enough, not clever enough, not arty enough.

Real contemporary artists shouldn’t use textiles according to my art school monster.

This is all nonsense, of course. Many wonderful artists use textiles. No one says boo to Louise Bourgeois or Ann Hamilton when they use fabric. One of my fellow students happily used felt all through her final year and as far as I recall no one said squat about it. Heck, she even got a couple of grants to go to a felt conference somewhere wacky like Uzbekistan and we all thoroughly enjoyed the presentation she gave when she returned. I sometimes used fabric when I was at art school and no one gave me a hard time about it either.

So where on earth does my monster get these crazy ideas?

I’ve been trying to take a leaf out of the wonderful Havi’s book and speak kindly to my monster. I tell it that I understand that it’s just trying to protect me from criticism and harm. But honestly, I think my monster is just a frightful snob and I wish it would take its stupid opinions and shove them!

Image by herlitz-monster-talent, used under Creative Commons license

I’d love to hear about your monsters in the comments…

Kirsty Hall: Broken Bauble, January 2010

Last October I took Alyson Stanfield’s excellent Blast Off course. This course was a life-changing experience for me – amongst other things, I realised that I need to find more sustainable ways to manage my health & my art before I can develop my career further.

Basically, I’ve been trying to build my house on sand. I’ve been constantly draining myself by doing more than my health allows. Because I’m pig awkward that way.

Last November’s arts trail was a good case in point. I’ve only just been back to take down 3 Score & 10 because I got sick immediately after the trail, then my host fell ill, then there was Christmas & snow. I finally managed to take the work down last Monday but completely exhausted myself in the process and I’ve been in a proper CFS crash ever since. I’m not quite on bed rest but it’s pretty close.

This is clearly absolutely unsustainable; I cannot continue to do shows if it knocks me out for months afterwards.

Now obviously I don’t want to give up doing shows: I love exhibiting my work – it’s one of my favourite parts of being an artist. Since I want to continue to make art and exhibit it, it’s clear to me that I need to do everything in my power to recover from my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

That’s a tough call because no one knows what causes it or how to fix it but even if I can’t find a permanent cure, I want to get to a healthier place. So I’ve been working on my pacing and my chronic insomnia. I also took a scary step and in November I joined Slimming World. I’ve lost 18.5 pounds so far and my goal is lose a further 3 stone by Christmas 2010, something I’m well on track to do. Losing weight is unlikely to be a miracle cure – I was unwell before I put on weight – but I know that being overweight can’t be helping. Slimming World is awesome, btw – I won’t bang on about it here but email if you’d like to know more about my experiences with it.

Even though I currently feel like Wile E. Coyote after he’s been squashed flat by an anvil, I’m taking the long view here. This is definitely NOT me giving up, it’s me refocusing and working on the basics. I do still have an art career, I’m just taking the scenic route: there will lots of tea breaks, picnics on the side of the road and photographs of sheep but I’ll get there eventually!

I’m currently doing Alyson Stanfield’s Blast Off course. It’s challenging and intense but I’m finding it incredibly revealing and useful. One of the daily lessons was about reconnecting with what made us want to be artists in the first place. Here’s what I wrote on the subject:

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I’ve been thinking back to some of the ecstatic points in my life that made me an artist.

1. I would have been about 16 – 17. I was still in secondary school and we were taken on a visit to Glasgow university. I had some free time and went into the Hunterian art gallery, where I was utterly transfixed by a full size Victorian/Edwardian painting of a woman. I can’t remember who it was by – I think it was possibly John Singer Sargent – but I sat there for about an hour, totally engrossed in it, with tears running down my face.

2. Standing in the Sacré-Cœur in Paris with clear December sunlight streaming through the Rose Window while the choir sang in Latin.

3. Seeing Eva Hesse’s drawings for the first time – I’d always loved her sculpture but the subtlety of her grey-toned drawings blew me away when I saw them in real life.

4. Walked round a corner in the Pompidou Centre and being confronted with Cubist paintings by Picasso. I was in my early 20’s and had only been seriously drawing for about three years. I had seen them previously about two years before and been singularly unimpressed – at the time I liked the Impressionists and I thought Cubism was ‘modern rubbish’. But when I saw them for the second time I’d done a lot more drawing and reading up on art and I suddenly got it. It was a surprisingly visceral moment, like a punch to the stomach! It’s a moment that’s stuck with me because it reminds me that even if I don’t initially like or understand a piece of art, it’s always worth taking a second look because my understanding of the visual world is constantly evolving.

But my defining moment was when I was 18 years old, sitting in an English lecture at college and getting absolutely FURIOUS at the way the lecturer completely pulling this book apart and remaking it in his own image. I found it so disrespectful, I was sat there thinking, “write your own damn book, mate!” and it suddenly hit me, “I don’t WANT to do this, I want to be the person MAKING things, not the person analysing things!”

Now I look back and I think, yes, THAT was the moment when I stepped through the looking glass!

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I’ve had many other meaningful encounters with art in my life but those are a few that stand out. Was there a defining moment in your life that took you down the path you’re on now? Have you ever experienced a piece of art that overwhelmed you with emotion?

This post was inspired by an entry on Hazel Dooney’s excellent blog after I got cross at some of the comments insisting that artists should be crazed geniuses living wild lifestyles.

The Death of Chatterton, Henry Wallis, 1856

I HATE the myth of the tortured artist.

Why do we want the lives of our artists to be a spectacle?

‘Oh artists, please sweat blood and tears. Blow your brains out. Die young from a heroin overdose. Stick your head in a gas oven. Paint in a drunken rage. Live in squalor and poverty. We want to see you struggle, suffer and go mad – then we’ll know what you made was real and important.’

Or you could just, you know, look at the art they’ve made.

Ah, but where’s the fun in that? It’s so much more exciting when the artist kills themselves or dies tragically young!

Um, does anyone else have a problem with the inherent vileness of this attitude?

Suicide isn’t romantic; it’s a terrible thing that destroys families. Alcoholism isn’t glamorous; it’s an extremely unpleasant addiction. Poverty isn’t heroic; it’s boring and exhausting.* Mental illness may indeed help someone to access and release their creativity but it can just as easily cripple them with so much pain that making art becomes impossible.

My life probably looks rather dull from the outside. Yes, it has aspects that other people would undoubtedly consider bohemian but as a general rule, it’s pretty domestic and mundane. I like staying at home. I like gardening, knitting, plittering around online and cooking when the mood takes me. I get a bizarre satisfaction from filling up the freezer with homemade food. I like wandering around with my camera in my hand observing tiny moments of everyday beauty. I like talking to my family, petting the cat and going to bed with a big pile of books & my hot water bottle. These days chocolate is my major vice. Most days, I feel content and blessed with my safe and boring life.

And I don’t care if you’d rather have razor blades and drugs and wild orgies – too bloody bad. Sorry to disappoint. But I’m not here to serve as lurid entertainment; I’m here to make my art and I’ve chosen the most sustainable way for me to do that. Oddly enough, I care more about making my art than about someone else’s need for salacious excitement. If you want the later, go watch reality TV!

Of course, I wouldn’t say I was exactly normal – if I don’t make art regularly then I go into Mad Project Mode and you’ll find me reorganising all my cupboards at 3 am or peeling wallpaper off the walls! Living in a safe, comfortable place surrounded by people who love me and having a dull routine where I make art most days actually stops me sliding into the crazy and I like it that way because I get more art made. My art is not improved by letting my crazier aspects loose; all that happens is that I don’t sleep enough, I manically work myself into the ground and then I spiral into a Chronic Fatigue crash that stops me working for weeks or even months.

I had a more extreme ‘tortured artist’ lifestyle when I was younger. It was a lot of fun and I have no regrets but in the end, I found that sort of drama-filled way of living didn’t serve my art or my health. I used to live on adrenaline, particularly when doing exhibitions. I would leave things to the last minute so that I had to work like a crazed banshee. I definitely got an ‘art high’ from making art in a frenzy of all-nighters but I simply don’t have the energy for that way of working any more so I try to avoid it, even though I’m undoubtedly still wired that way.

And frankly, a lot of my last-minute art wasn’t as good as the art I made when I had more time. Sure, sometimes it was great- deadlines do focus the mind wonderfully – but often it wasn’t and when that was the case, there wasn’t time to fix it or make something better. Work made in a frenzy of passion is not intrinsically better or more ‘artistic’ than work made by plodding along – it’s just a more glamorous and seductive story.

Of course there’s still a place for the heroic in art. Just as there’s a place for the tortured genius, the rootless nomad who travels the world in search of inspiration, the debauched drunken artist who pees in the fireplace and the art prodigy who burns out and dies at 25. These things are just not a necessary ingredient for all artists – many of our great artists lived surprisingly boring lives.

Art is a very wide church and there’s room for all of us and our myriad ways of working and living. An artist who works best in tortured bursts of madness is no better or worse than an artist who gets to the studio at 9am and puts in an eight hour work day every single day of their lives: they’re just different people, with different needs and different ways of working. We do artists a huge disservice by insisting that ‘real’ artists must all conform to a stereotype of tortured genius.

That said, I’d never criticise anyone for following their muse into the wild dark places because I’ve travelled those roads and I know there’s beauty and art to be found there. If you are creatively energised by more extreme ways of living and working, then I genuinely hope you have an absolute blast and that your stamina holds out! If mine had, I’d probably still be working that way because I did enjoy it but it wasn’t any more noble, artistic or intrinsically valid than the way I work now.

……

Naturally, I’m not alone in discussing this subject:

Daniel Sroka, a regular commenter on this blog, dislikes the tortured artist myth.

Anna Williams feels the tortured artist myth also damages writers.

Artist, Megan Chapman acknowledges that the myth has some basis in reality.

Unsurprisingly, it’s all The Romantics fault!

* Edited to Add:
CopyCatFilms on Twitter felt I was judging poor people in this sentence. I’m not at all and I apologise if it read that way. I’ve been poor in the past and it absolutely sucks.

Yes, my life is nice now but it wasn’t always this way. I’ve been so poor that I’ve had to look down the back of the couch for pennies so that I could eat. I’ve been so poor that I knew exactly which order to pay the bills in and exactly how long I could leave it before a vital service was cut off. And in my experience, it wasn’t romantic or creative or fun, it was depressing and yes, boring. It was soul-numbingly, grindingly, depressingly tedious. Of course, your experience of poverty may vary – I had postnatal depression and was an overwhelmed and isolated single parent of a small child; no doubt this strongly coloured my experience.

Do I regret having been poor? No, I don’t. It taught me many valuable life skills, made me more compassionate towards those who are locked into generational poverty, showed me just how much middle class privilege I have always had (even though I was poor, I was educated and I knew I wouldn’t be poor forever) and how our life choices can spiral us into poverty. I certainly don’t regret the choice to keep my son, which was what temporarily sunk me into real poverty in the first place.

However, no longer being in a constant state of bio-survival anxiety makes it far easier for me to make art. I make more art than I did then because I have more support, both financial and emotional for my art now. I know that I’m extremely lucky to be where I am and believe me, I am constantly aware of this. And no, I have no desire to go back to living in a neighbourhood where the local children threw stones at my window and I cowered in my living room and wept with fear.