Tag Archives: Art thoughts

The problem with thinking • 17 Comments

Kirsty • November 22, 2008

One of the advantages of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work.

Unfortunately one of the downsides of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work!

In art college you learn to be critical of what you make and you learn a language with which to talk about your work. These are valuable skills and I'm glad I was taught them. However, thinking deeply about my work can become a handicap on occasion. I've found it can inhibit me and prevent me from starting work or make me constantly question the worth of an idea when it's in that delicate beginning stage. Six years out of college, I still hear the sceptical voice of my tutor rattling around inside my brain asking me if the work is really meaningful and well-considered.

Of course, it's important to be able to think and talk about our work; being an artist today requires those skills. But it's also important that analysing and talking about the work doesn't impede the actual making of the work. Analysing and making are two very particular skill sets that require different sorts of vision and attention. I run into trouble when I get the order muddled up: letting the analytical side out too early to run riot through half-formed ideas can be fatal to my productivity. Right now I need to make art without second-guessing myself all the time, something I've been doing a lot lately.

This has been a hard year for me - I've been weighed down with illness, both my own and that of my son. Thankfully he is much better and is back at school now but the strain of caring for him during the first half of this year has left me drained and unwell. Consequently it's been a pretty hopeless year for art and I am currently in the tricky position of emotionally needing to make art but having very little physical energy to do so.

This tension is expressing itself in a hypercritical over-awareness of what little I am making, constant worrying about what I'm not making, fretting over whether my art is any good and all the rest of the neurotic behaviour to which artists are prone. I consider myself to be fairly level-headed as artists go, yet I still fall prey to these fears and anxieties, most especially when I'm not making art at the pace and level that I need to. I don't think of my art as therapy but let's just say that my family have been known to beg me to go to my studio if I've gone too long without making!

But although I clearly need to work, I don't have the energy to do so in any consistent way at the moment. So instead I'm concentrating on improving my health and consoling myself by making little drawings that don't take too much time or energy. And when my inner art tutor starts muttering that the drawings 'look a bit Foundation-y', well, I just grit my teeth and try to ignore him. I'm also a) considering hiding the work from myself until I can look at it with a clearer and calmer eye and b) telling myself that it doesn't have to be good anyway. Those inner critics can be persistent buggers - sometimes tricking them is the only way to get anything done!

Balance Comments • 10 Comments

Kirsty • November 4, 2008

I really appreciate the comments I get on this blog but I'm a bit lousy at answering them, as those of you who get a reply weeks or months later already know! I've been making an effort to catch up lately and while doing so, I was struck by the insightful comments I got on last month's Falling Off Beams post: it seems that I'm not alone in struggling to find a balance between life and art. Instead of answering the comments individually, I thought I'd quote them here and just for a bit of fun, I set myself the challenge of going to the sites of those who commented and trying to find an image that related to the idea of balance.

Vivien Blackburn wrote:

That description of childhood gym and the terror of that beam for an un-athletic child with no balance brought back memories for me!

me too

and yes, life is often like that

Vivien was easy; on visiting her site, I immediately spotted this beautiful charcoal drawing of an apparently impossibly balanced rock.

Vivien Blackburn: Rocks above Sennen Cove, Charcoal

iHanna wrote:

Thanks for writing what I’m feeling too Kristy! All those unwritten blog posts, all those things one plan and never will get to! :-)

calmness and chaos!

More chaos than calm by the look of it - iHanna's moleskine notebook is full and so is her brain!

iHanna: Image from Moleskine journal

Annalisa from Kaizen Journey wrote:

Well said! I feel as though I have been buffeted by conflicting forces for awhile now too, and like you said balance can be hard to find but the struggle for it is what makes life lively…

This was a tougher choice, I could have chosen some of Annalisa's lovely symmetrical shibori but in the end, I decided on this delicate floating image. Maybe on the days when balance feels hard we can all try to breath deep, lie back and just float a little?

Alsokaizen: In Solution

Daniel Sroka wrote:

I have a partially written post just like this one sitting in my blog’s Drafts folder. I believe that you may need the tension between what you have to do and what you want to do in order to move ahead with either. It is the energy created by the two, like a magnetic force, that pushes you forward.

Wise words there from Daniel, I shall try to keep them in mind the next time I'm beating myself up for not working hard enough. I knew I'd be spoilt for choice on Daniel's site and indeed, the problem wasn't finding something appropriate but narrowing it down to just one image.

Daniel Sroka: Flight

dryadart wrote:

good to know there are others struggling to make room in a “real” life for the art they must make… some days one feels so alone… balance, peace, space, wisdom, all such elusive and fleeting things, thanks for the post

I just loved this quirky drawing from dryadart. I enjoyed the sense that all the figures were slightly off balance, the centre figure in particular looks like she's about to fall.

Lee from Dancing Crow wrote:

thank you for a reminder that balance is not-falling, rather than any simple pose that can be maintained over time. I am flailing my workroom, trying to winnow and weed and return to the pristine space only things I really want to work on. An impossible task, of course, all the old projects and ideas are crowding about looking for a chance to be made (or finished) as well as new ideas…

And here's a perfect image from Lee to finish.

Lee: Untitled

Thanks to everyone who commented, I appreciated all your words of wisdom - although it did make me wonder if any of us are ever in balance? If you have any tips or tricks to finding a balance between your life and your art, then please let me know because it sounds as many of us could do with some help in that department!

Fungi • 18 Comments

Kirsty • October 3, 2008

The blog has been quite text-heavy in the last few days, so here's an image-based post for a bit of balance.

A couple of weeks ago I planted some coriander seeds that I'd harvested from the plant in my window box. The plan was to have some growing inside over the winter but I don't think it's working since all I seem to be getting is a fine crop of admittedly inspirational mushrooms!

The compost was obviously shot through with mycelium. These come up in little clumps of two or three mushrooms and they only last a day or two at most before they crumple into nothingness.

Kirsty Hall: Fungi, Sept 08

In these two shots, you can see how tiny and translucent they are. I was sure this would disintegrate as soon as I picked it up but although it was fragile, it was stronger than it looked and I was able to delicately hold it while I photographed it.

Kirsty Hall: Fungi, Sept 08

Looking at these I was reminded of the incredible mushroom drawings by Chris Drury.

Here is his description of how he makes them:

If you cut off the stem of a mushroom and place it on a piece of paper overnight, covered with a bowl, it will drop its spores onto the paper in the pattern of the gills. The spore print here is digitally scanned and printed in three versions and altered by changing the contrast in Photoshop. The prints are glued and ironed onto the canvas which is built up in layers of gesso to form a surface for writing.
This radiating pattern of spore lines draws you in as a mandala would, but if you take a magnifying glass and follow one line from the centre out to the periphery then you will notice that each line branches and branches again like the limb of a tree. In making these densely written works this is in fact what I do: I follow the principle of the line that branches, only in densely hand-written words, in inks of different tones, with reed pens of different thickness, gathered from the banks of the river (everything flows here) and which have to be constantly sharpened and dried. The written words are repeated and hypnotic, like a mantra. The words cease to have meaning, the concentration is on the sound. A word that has a good sound is easy to write. It flows on to the canvas. The concentration is on the sound, the shape, the size, the colour, the tone, the branches. The words are the mantra that shape the mandala.

Chris Drury: Destroying Angel – Trinity

Chris Drury: Destroying Angel – Trinity
White printed spore prints and radiating lines of text in white ink and pencil on black prepared canvas. Text reads: 'Amanita virosa- Destroying angel'

Needless to say, I adore the obsessiveness and repetitiveness of this process! Imagine doing all that writing, and these aren't small pieces - each canvas is 187cm square. I wonder if he ever makes spelling mistakes? If I was writing something over and over like that, I know I would start losing all sense of the words and I would start getting them wrong. It reminds me of the sort of obsessive use of writing that you sometimes see in Outsider Art.

I've been a fan of Drury's work since I saw his 'Medicine Wheel' piece in Leeds City Art Gallery. That piece - a circular collection of natural objects collected daily for a year - was a definite influence on my Diary Project.

Chris Drury: Medicine Wheel

Unusually for a well-known artist, Drury not only has his own web site but he even writes a blog. A recent exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art also has an associated blog by the gallery staff and they even have sets on Flickr.

I'm quite delighted by this. I constantly meet artists who don't have any web presence and don't grasp why this is a problem: I often end up doing five minute impromptu versions of my articles about how artists can use the web. Many famous artists don't even seem to have their own dedicated sites. Seriously, what's up with that? Surely they can afford to pay someone to do it. Hell, if I can do it, surely Damien Hirst can manage it! What's the matter, Damien, did someone pinch 'damienhirst.org' out from under you? I can only assume that they think it's unimportant or perhaps it's seen as a bit too democratic or something - I don't know why it happens but I find it very odd.

So it's fantastic to see an established artist and a big institution using blogging and the net to directly engage with their audience and I hope other mainstream members of the art world will eventually follow suit. I know lots of galleries have websites but I often get the sense that they don't quite 'get' the web; I think many of them still think in terms of the old models of top-down publishing. Hmm, something else to research and think about...

More on funding • 12 Comments

Kirsty • October 1, 2008

Katherine from Making Your Mark left a detailed comment on yesterday's blog post that I'm going to address here because she raises some important points.

[Katherine's words are in italics.]

First - I too would have been very annoyed at the tenor of the comments you quoted. (BTW your link for the politician is ‘dead’). It did seem rather generic and sterotyped to me.

Thanks for alerting me to the broken link, Katherine, I fixed it - see what happens when you write impassioned blog posts after midnight!

Second - the Arts Council has been criticised for its last round of grant-giving and there has been an investigation and a report into the chaos which ensued. The report was published at the end of July.

Katherine linked to the report, which is here if anyone wants to read it.

Now on to the meat of what Katherine has to say:

As somebody who, a very long time ago, used to sit on the other side of grant giving machinery (some of which involved the arts) I can tell you that if there wasn’t a fee to pay to process the grant, there would be a whole load more applications from people without serious intent. The net effect of that would be that they would still need to be processed and that would mean money intended for arts would need to be diverted into administration. Administrators, if faced with this sort of situation, then end up devising ways of quickly scuttling applications to whittle them down to a serious few.

Fees are a crude way of diverting those who aren’t serious - but they generally work.

When I was talking about fees, I was only referring to fees for applying for exhibitions, not application fees for grants. Art Council England does not currently ask applicants to pay application fees but it's possible that other funders might. This makes sense since Arts Council officers are already employed to do things like read applications. I can see a case for independent funders such as charities levying an application fee if they are in a situation where they'd otherwise be deluged by applications that they can't afford to process but since I rarely apply for funding, I've no idea if it's a common practice.

I have slightly more tolerance for paying an application fee for a grant application than I do for paying a curator to look at my work, which is what a non-refundable application fee to an exhibition amounts to. In the later case, I think that galleries are exploiting artists as a convenient funding stream. I think it's a lazy and cynical ploy but artists are often so desperate for exposure that they tolerate it. I don't mind shouldering some of the costs ONCE I'M SELECTED but I object strongly to subsidising galleries and other artists by paying a fee just to have my application looked at.

Incidentally, if any gallery owners or arts administrators feel they can justify this practice of charging artists non-refundable fees to apply for exhibitions, I'm happy to give you a platform on this blog to do so - drop me an email.

I understand and accept Katherine's argument that some funders may end up spending all their funding on administration instead of actual funding, although I'd suggest that they might want to address the structure of their own organisation before using fees as a form of screening. Whether I was personally prepared to pay a fee for a funding application would depend on many issues, including how large the fee was and what percentage of applicants were funded. However, from my limited experience in filling out funding applications, most funders seem to prefer to weed out applicants by making the forms long and tedious! Katherine addresses this issue next:

The forms might also be complex - but similarly they tend to test out whether people have really thought through their idea - or whether they just have a good idea which they really need to go away and work on some more.

I agree with Katherine here. Although I loathe filling in any sort of form and the Arts Council forms make me cry, I have found them useful in defining the project that I was seeking to have funded. It can be very illuminating to be forced to analyse what you're trying to do; who and where your audience is and how you're going to attract them; what benefits your project will have for the wider community and what your definitions for success are.

Sure, it's not fun but it can be worthwhile so I don't mind that. What I do strongly mind is the idea that it somehow isn't work. I feel there is a definite cultural bias towards anything artists do being regarded as Not Real Work simply because it's artists who are doing it. This attitude was quite clearly displayed in the comment I took issue with yesterday. Apparently the person in question believes that artists sit around looking pretty and people throw money at them. Hahahaha, if only!

If I design posters, business cards or spend hours on the computer writing up grant proposals why is this somehow miraculously Not Work? If I spend ages working on my website is it Not Work just because I'm an artist? If I spend hours beavering away at something in the studio is it Not Work just because I don't have an immediate buyer for what I've made?

I think this is partly ignorance - most people have no real idea of what artists do all day and many of them would be hocked if they saw the level of detail involved in an Arts Council England funding form or had to wade through the huge tomes of alternate funders with their myriad of different requirements. Anyone who has managed to get funding has invariably jumped through umpteen hoops to secure that money.

Part of the problem is that much of what artists do is speculative and the financial benefits are not immediately apparent or forthcoming. You apply for an exhibition that you might not get into; you apply for a grant because even if you don't get it, it gets your name in front of the funders and that could pay off in the future; you edit your photos because some day you'll need them for applications or magazine articles; you make work that you hope you'll be able to find a venue for... and so on and so forth. So it's not a simple 'effort in = money out' equation and a lot of people don't understand our motivations to keep slogging away at something that we don't get paid for. Like I said yesterday, some days I don't understand it myself! But that's just how it is. Unless you're working solely to commission, most artists follow some version of this 'just get on and make the work and hope the money follows' system at some point in their careers.

You’d be really surprised how many people want to be given money without putting any sort of real effort into making a good case. Seriously.

Sigh, unfortunately I probably wouldn't be surprised at all. When I was curating, I received some absolutely dire applications where it was clear that the person either couldn't be bothered or didn't have a clue what was required. And I was only asking for slides, a CV and an artists statement, which is nowhere near as complicated as a funding form.

I think that anyone who expects to snap their fingers and get public or private funding for any project, art-related or not, is staggeringly naive but a couple of rounds of filling in forms and writing endless begging letters ought to be enough to open their eyes. I remember talking with one of my tutors at art college and he said that a lot of initially promising projects that he was involved with floundered at the funding stage. Hearing that from someone who was relatively well established made it a lot easier when I got my first rejection letters from potential funders.

Finally, I don’t know any business which doesn’t incur marketing costs to get business and generate income. I’ve always seen time spent on grant applications and fees as exactly that - part of the normal cost of doing business. I don’t know why artists should expect to be let off ‘normal costs’ just because they’re artists.

I don't believe that artists should be let off costs simply because they are artists and I also regard applying for opportunities as a necessary part of the costs of being an artist. However, the economy of the arts are undeniably weird. In what other business do so many people work for free so much of the time?

Hell, most of us spend money just being artists. I remember reading years ago that the average annual baseline costs for operating as an artist (studio fees, business expenses, materials etc) was about £5,000 - I imagine it's gone up considerably since then. I have a studio at home partly so that I can afford to be an artist without a part time job yet my costs (art materials, printer ink, web hosting, exhibition costs and travelling expenses to shows etc) still average a couple of thousand pounds most years. And I'm not using a lot of expensive materials...

This would be fine if the arts were well paid and sheer hard work was enough to ensure success but I'm guessing we all know how that one goes!

So - bottom line. I agree with you - lots of artists exercise a whole load of skills other than their talent to try and make art work for them. On the other hand, any artist or organisation which factors in the costs of being business-like into the total equation is far more likely to succeed.

I totally agree and I think that anyone who goes into the arts expecting fame, fortune and everyone to fall at their feet is in for a very rude awakening. As artists we all need educate ourselves about the various financial options available to us. It's vitally important to work out where you fit and what you're comfortable with doing to fund your practice. But that's a discussion for another day because it's probably at least half a dozen blog posts!

An average artist responds • 5 Comments

Kirsty • September 30, 2008

The Canadian author and well known knitter, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has just written a searingly polite but vicious post about the recent obnoxious comments about the arts made by Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

The comments on Stephanie's blog were mostly supportive of the arts but one comment really got my goat because it betrayed such a profound lack of understanding about the realities of working in the arts.

Tonja wrote (cut to show the relevant parts, spelling in context):

"I, also being a relative "average" citizen as yourself, find it extremely irritating when artists of all sorts feel that it is their "right" to be a snob about their art. What I mean is this: I am using my God-given talents to the best of my ability, and while they are not astronomically brilliant, I have to work to provide a living for myself. I am using my TALENTS to provide for my LIVING. Operative word: work - and I work hard. I find it resentful when artists feel that thier talent should entail them to life's finer side of life simply because their painting (which sometimes I feel I could replicate easily) or their violin playing (which I could possibly mimic by whistling) is "talent". Pure talent is not an entitlement - and this is what I felt that Mr. Harper was saying - that there are those of us "average" citizens who work hard and labor for our livings while there are people - "artists" - who feel that they don't have to work simply because of their "talent". Having a subsidy is not work, it is a privilege that they receive as a recognition for their talents, therefore those artists that receive such subsidies should be grateful."

Here is the response I posted on Stephanie's blog:

Ah, clearly spoken by one who has never gone through the hell of filling out an arts council grant form!

Tonja, who are all these artists you know who sit around twiddling their thumbs and expecting to be funded? Because I work in the arts and everyone I know is a) skint, b) working far more hours a week than most people and c) doesn't get holidays, sick leave or any benefits. Most of them DON'T get grant funding and those who are lucky enough to get funding spend weeks or months putting together highly detailed funding applications and scrabbling around for every single penny.

Most of the artists, writers, musicians and theatre people I know need to work two jobs - their art job and then the job they have to do to pay the rent. I believe that the majority of the artists in the US have no health insurance and I know for certain that the majority of artists in the UK have no pension, not because we're too lazy to work and sit around expecting our talent to somehow miraculously translate into money but because the arts are appallingly badly paid. Often the artist is the one person in the equation who gets nothing. Are you regularly expected to work for no pay? As a fine artist, I am! People expect me to put in written proposals for free, I am expected to pay my own way when I enter shows, hell sometimes I'm expected to pay an application fee for the privilege of even applying for a show! In the last six years as an emerging artist I've never been paid and I've have had travelling expenses ONCE.

Talent means NOTHING without a great deal of hard work and there are damn few folk in any area of the arts who haven't 'paid their dues' by spending YEARS working very hard for very little financial reward before 'suddenly' becoming famous.

..................

Are there pretentious idiots in the arts? Hell yes! Undoubtedly there are those in the arts who don't do the rest of us any favours but every industry has its stereotypes (Lawyer jokes, anyone? And what about those arrogant doctors?) and I'm sure there are people in every industry that make their peers cringe.

I know that many people don't 'get' what we do and sometimes we don't explain it very well. Heck, some days I don't get why I do it either! But I am incredibly fed up of people assuming that artists don't work, that artists expect to be funded and moan when we aren't.

Oh OK, so artists do moan about funding but come on, everyone moans about the 'upper management' in their jobs, don't they? Artists moaning about the Arts Council (or local equivalent) is mostly just our version of standing around the water cooler bitching about those idiots in Accounts!

I've certainly never expected to get funding from anyone and I know very few people in the arts who do: as a rule, we're all extremely aware just how fragile, random and incomprehensible the funding system is. I've never applied for an individual grant from the Arts Council England but I have been involved in two groups who got tiny sums for a couple of projects and believe me when I say that those couple of hundred pounds were very hard won - I could probably have earned much more in far less time if I'd gone and stood on a street corner!

Right now there are a lot of very hard-working, unpretentious and worthwhile arts organisations in Britain who are hurting because the Olympics have resulted in widespread funding cuts to the arts (despite our government saying that 'no, no, of course money wouldn't be taken from the arts to pay for the Olympics). In the last year I've noticed the number of opportunities advertised in [AN] Magazine has absolutely plummeted although whether this is related to the credit crunch or funding cuts, I'm not sure.

It's not just the visual arts either, I know several writers and they're freaking out about the state of the publishing industry. There are currently lots of changes happening in the way that the arts are organised, distributed and paid for and many of us at the bottom of the arts hierarchy - i.e. those of us who actually make the art - aren't doing at all well.

So no, we're not sitting around waiting for taxpayers to fund us and expecting that our 'talent' will see us through. Most of us are out there working a second job and/or choosing to survive on very little so that we have more time for our art (I have to do my taxes next month - yet another year where I won't even have made enough to pay tax) and wondering if we'll ever get out of debt...

Falling off beams • 13 Comments

Kirsty • September 8, 2008

I thought I'd write about balance today. It's supposed to be my 'word of the year' but I don't feel I've been very focused on it or that my life has been very balanced in these last 8 months.

I remember walking along the beam in gymnastics when I was in primary school. It was simply an overturned wooden bench with a thick, solid cross-beam and it was probably only about 30cms from the floor but it might as well have been a rickety log above a raging torrent as far as I was concerned! I never felt safe on that beam and I often fell and had to go back to the start and try again. I was not an athletic child and my balance was never great. Of course, I might have done better if my imagination hadn't been soaring above me, so that I was secretly half convinced that I was a spangly circus star on a terrifyingly thin wire suspended above a gasping crowd.

Last Monday my son returned from his summer in Scotland and the rest of the week was spent getting ready for his return to school on the Thursday. It's always a bit of last minute scrum of haircuts, laundry and new school shoes and I'm sure that I'm not the only artist mother who has found her art falling by the wayside on the week that term starts. Some weeks, life simply takes precedence and art has to be shoved aside.

This week we should settle back into a normal term-time routine and at last I'll have more studio time but even though it's positive, these transitions still hit me hard. This year was even more stressed than usual because due to illness, my son hadn't been in school since Christmas. Fortunately he made it back without incident and although I have a lot of residual anxiety, things seem (fingers crossed!) to be OK now.

It recently occurred to me that I secretly believe there's a perfect life/work balance that can be miraculously attained and then indefinitely and effortlessly maintained. Whereas in reality, I'm still this distracted kid who constantly falls off the beam and has to go back to the beginning. When I'm parenting, I feel slightly irked that I'm not making my art but when I'm making art, I feel slightly guilty that I might be neglecting my parenting. It's never a perfect balance: I am always on the wrong end of a see-saw or spinning frantically on a roundabout feeling sick and wishing I could jump off.

And in truth, that's how it is for all of us because balance isn't balance if you can't fall. To be mutable, unstable and ever-changing is simply the nature of balance - if a thing is steady, immovable and fixed then there's no need for balance at all. And whose life is steady, immovable and fixed? Certainly not mine!

In my more enlightened moments, I understand this but enlightenment - like balance - constantly slips from our grasp. So here we all are, balancing on our thin little lives and constantly shifting our weight from one side to the other. Maybe we're smoothly adjusting to the airflow around us or maybe we're juggling plates on the high wire, frantically wobbling and worrying that we are about to fall off!

I once saw a short film that involved a man standing in front of a sign. One arrow of the sign was labelled ART while the other, which pointed in the opposite direction, was labelled LIFE. The man hovered indecisively and anxiously between them, running off first in one direction and then a moment later running back the other way. Back and forth he went at varying speeds and for varying lengths of time, occasionally slumping against the sign in utter exhaustion. Art/life, life/art: a constant struggle, a constant search for balance. The audience, largely made up of artists, was in fits of laughter, all of us clearly experiencing comedy of recognition.

As I grow older, I realise that, as John Lennon said, "life is what happens while you are making other plans". This is my life: this muddle of half tended garden plants; a child who needs new school trousers (even though he said he didn't!); a messy, neglected studio; a house in a state of flux from bouts of decluttering; emails left unanswered; blog posts unwritten; a head full of half-baked art ideas and always more things on my to-do list than my health can truly handle.

Yet I still walk across that beam every day; some days feeling the cavernous drop beneath my feet, some days seeing that I am really only 30cms from the ground and perfectly safe. And I think perhaps you do too...

Authenticity, Sacredness and Plastic Bags • 22 Comments

Kirsty • August 19, 2008

Last week was awash with celebrations - a birthday, an anniversary, a day out, a tie-dye party and BBQ and a good friend staying for the weekend. Between all that and the inevitable exhaustion, I had no time or energy for blogging but I've been itching to tell you about the day out.

Last Tuesday, for my partner's birthday, we visited the gorgeous Virtuous Well over in Trellech.

Kirsty Hall: The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Once one of the major towns in medieval Wales, Trellech is now a small but archaelogically fascinating village about a 45 minute drive from us. We'd discovered the well quite by accident the previous week after a visit to Tintern Abbey and we decided to go back with a picnic because we'd fallen in love with the place and we wanted to find the standing stones that had eluded us the week before.

The Virtuous Well or St Anne's Well is a Christianised well almost certainly built over a Celtic sacred spring. It's a lovely place; it's in a field just off a country road but it feels about a million miles from anywhere. You can walk down into the well and sit on little stone seats while you soak up the atmosphere. There are little alcoves where you can leave offerings - on the first visit I picked buttercups from the field, this time we brought sweet peas from our garden.

The water contains iron, which may be responsible for its reputed medicinal qualities. The water was thought to be especially good for 'complaints particular to women', which would make sense if the woman in question was anaemic from endless pregnancies and breastfeeding.

Above the well, people have festooned a tree with fabric offerings.

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

This is a very old British custom: tying pieces of cloth called clooties or clouties onto trees beside sacred wells is believed to have Celtic origins.

Originally people would leave pieces of clothing that had been soaked in the well water in the belief that their ailment would pass from them as the cloth rotted. These days, a more eclectic variety of (mostly) fabric offerings are left. I noted a plethora of ribbons and strips of torn cloth interspersed with more unusual items including scarves; a pair of underpants; socks; a martial arts belt; a ceramic medallion; hollow blown eggs; a hand-crocheted flower; numerous hair decorations; strings of beads; shoelaces; knotted plastic bags; the remnants of a balloon; bright yellow fruit netting; a Tibetan prayer flag and even a cuddly toy. They were all knotted and tied together in what I felt was a genuine outpouring of decorative and sacred expression.

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

I read one review of the well that decried the modern cloutie rags because some of the fabric is man-made. But I loved them all. There's a raw honesty to this sort of spontaneous folk installation that I find very appealing.

While it might be better if people thought ahead and brought biodegradable offerings, I love that people aren't constrained by what might be thought as proper but instead offer the item that they are moved to leave. While many of the offerings have obviously been deliberately chosen, I suspect that many people find the well by accident and leave what they have on them in an instinctive response to the existing offerings. It certainly explains the hair ties and beads.

And really, who cares if it isn't 'authentic'? It's far more important to me that this place is still in ceremonial use. And who gets to define authenticity anyway? Perhaps the person leaving a sock was genuinely trying to heal their foot? Perhaps the grimy, slowly rotting underpants were originally part of a fertility ritual! There was no graffiti on or near the well and there was no rubbish lying around. Everything that had been left had been done so neatly, carefully and reverently. Sure, some of the offerings could be seen as irreverent but the way they were placed suggested that they weren't. Surely authenticity isn't something that's set in stone but is, instead, a reflection of what people actually do.

Should I have gone and removed all the artificial objects from the tree in a futile longing for some sort of sacred or environmental purity? I don't have that right. And I simply don't want to. If folk customs such as leaving rags at wells are not to fade into obscurity then I think we need to accept that they will change and that some people will leave cotton Tibetan prayer flags while others will leave neatly tied plastic bags. And taking the long view, perhaps one day future archaeologists will unearth 'inauthentic' plastic beads and fragments of polyester ribbon that have fallen from the tree and been buried in the earth and they will know that this was once a sacred well. For all its wonderful qualities, cloth made from natural fibres is in pretty short supply in archaeology, especially in somewhere as damp as Britain.

The well, in all its splendidly inauthentic authenticity, is a very special place and one we plan to return to regularly. On our first visit - when we couldn't find the very large, extremely phallic and quite hard to miss Harold's Stones - it really felt as though we were meant to find the well instead. If we'd visited the stones as we'd planned, we wouldn't have had time to visit the well and might never have returned to discover this little gem.

Oh, and one last funny thing - when I was checking on Flickr to see if there were any other photos of the well, the first image to appear on my screen happened to be this photograph of my friend Ally, taken by another friend, Camilla. Having found the well by sheer coincidence in the first place, I laughed and laughed...

A different sort of mess • 14 Comments

Kirsty • July 22, 2008

I'm a little disturbed that I haven't posted here since last Tuesday because I could have sworn that I had. I hate it when I start losing time, it usually means that I'm overdoing things a little and falling prey to the brain fog that's common in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

...........

So, another Tuesday, another look at the concept of mess. I'm considering it from a slightly different angle this week.

DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND

I had an interesting experience last week: someone contacted me offering to 'moneterize'* my blog with an advertising link. I politely declined and then got a slightly cheeky email back saying, amongst other things, that 'it's just a link'.

But it isn't just a link.

While I'm flattered to be asked, adding advertising to my site is not something I want to do. One of the reasons my site looks good is because it isn't covered with too much visual information. This is deliberate choice on my part. I loathe the way places like MySpace look, I find them almost nauseating in their visual clutter and one of the first things I said to my web designer was, "I want my site to be clean." My designer did a fantastic job making a sleek, beautiful and functional space for me and I do my part by not messing it up!

My site is an area in my life - one of the few - where mess doesn't randomly proliferate because I have to make a conscious decision to make a mess here; I can't just randomly wander through, put something down and wander off again. Instead, I resist the temptation to put lots of stuff up on my sidebars. I think long and hard about every single item that goes up there and on occasion I've decided not to put up things that might benefit me because I feel that the resulting visual clutter would outweigh the benefits.

Why would I compromise that purity by putting someone else's advertising on here?

I don't need advertising on this site, it's not expensive to run and I consider it part and parcel of the ongoing costs of being an artist. Paying for my hosting once a year is no less important to my art than buying art materials, getting business cards printed or buying art books and magazines for research.

I make no money. In the 5 years since I graduated, I haven't had to pay taxes once because even when I had a part time job, I've never made enough to exceed the personal tax allowance. I survive through the good will of my partner who financially supports me. So you'd think that I'd jump at the chance to get a bit of extra cash.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch. Having advertising on this site would be messy and I feel that it would compromise my art. I'm not saying that it's evil to advertise. Every artist must make the decision about whether to accept advertising for themselves. For some artists it might be the right choice. For me, it's not.

I was trying to pin down exactly why it isn't right for me when I read this spot-on blog post by Seth Godin last night and had an lightbulb moment. He writes:

Here's the essential truth:

This is the first mass marketing medium ever that isn't supported by ads.

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn't please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That's the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn't invented by business people, and it doesn't exist to help your company make money.

That's it exactly! My blog does not exist to make YOU money. Heck, it doesn't even exist to make ME money, although it may well have that effect in the long run. Certainly part of the reason it exists is to increase my profile in the art world and hopefully to garner me real world art opportunities but mostly it exists simply because I like to write, share photos and talk to other interesting artists.

Not everything in the world is for sale and I value having this one clean, controlled space in a mostly messy life far, far more than I'd value a few extra quid in my bank account.

* Incidentally, can we please take the word 'moneterize' out back and have it shot!

Messy Tuesdays • 3 Comments

Kirsty • July 2, 2008

I've been seeing references to Messy Tuesdays for a couple of months now. I thought, 'hmm, sounds right up my street' but didn't follow it up. And then, whilst following a link from the excellent needled blog yesterday, I found the fascinating Felix and discovered that, along with Lara, she was one of the originators of the Messy Tuesdays idea.

Here's Lara's post introducing the idea of Messy Tuesday and Felix's original post, complete with manifesto...

Messy Tuesdays Manifesto:

You are not your flawless surfaces. You are not your orderly laundry-pile. You are not the seamlessness of your Finished Objects. You are not your risen cakes. You are not your sewn-in ends.

Messy Tuesdays seems to have struck a cord with many bloggers. Felix's post, Mess Is Beautiful has inspired me to order some Toni Morrison from the library. The F-Word addresses the feminist aspects of domestic mess but Penny points out that someone has to clear up. I loved the story behind this box of tangled threads on Practical Polly's blog. The needled blog celebrates mess while mootthings experience with breeding plant pots will doubtless be familiar to every gardener.

Here's my contribution to the conversation:

Mess is a vital part of art. Without mess there can be no art. That doesn't mean that all artists are inherently messy - although many are - just that the creative process itself is not a tidy one. There are wrong turns, false starts, abandoned pieces, 3am ideas scrawled frantically in sketchbooks, creative messes left lying on desks and in corners. Even if you are a tidy artist who puts things away when you're done, in the midst of creating it's likely that paint is smeared all over your palette, your pencils are in disarray, fabric pieces are scattered randomly around your sewing machine or you have clay, paint or plaster lodged under your fingernails.

And more than the purely physical mess of creating, there is that singular moment in many art pieces when chaos descends and you can no longer see what it is you are doing. The original purpose gets lost and suddenly there is only messy paint on canvas, confused lines on paper or a hideous lump of clay beneath your hands. This is the point where many people give up, not realising that this moment of sheer chaos is the fertile ground where new art grows. Not all your creative seeds will grow into something wonderful and worthwhile - some just stay messes - but without the courage to step into the messy, uncomfortable, annoying part of the creative process, nothing new will arrive.

I can't write about Messy Tuesday without spotlighting a mess of my own. Here's the current state of my bed.

Kirsty Hall: Messy Bed, July 2008

Yes, my bed; the place that all the magazine articles and decluttering books tell you should be a romantic, restful haven. Notice how mine is covered with work instead! Here we have piles of books and magazines that I'm in the midst of reading, a journal, pens, a roll of pencils, several pads of cartridge paper, a pile of finished drawings, a pile of unfinished drawings, drawing board (what, you don't have a drawing board on your bed?) and lots of lists.

Why don't I put it all on the floor next to the bed? Er, well, there isn't room...

Kirsty Hall: Messy Bedroom Floor, July 2008

I will be tidying this soon as it's getting to the 'too much on the bed' stage. That doesn't mean the bed will be empty when I'm done, just that I'd like to change the sheets before starting a new, fresher pile of work!

Baby Feet and Broccoli

Kirsty • June 24, 2008

I've always noticed cast iron. Even as a kid I was fascinated by the different shapes of gates and railings. Maybe it's because there's a history of blacksmithing on my mum's side: if I'd been born a boy in an earlier generation, I might have spent my days banging bits of metal into ornate curves. So it's no surprise that I like to take pictures of railings, especially when they're deliciously rusty.

This railing is really unusual. I've not seen another one like it and I can't work out what era it's from.

Kirsty Hall: Rusty Railings, May 2008

Kirsty Hall: Rusty Railings, June 2008

These railing are just round the corner from me and the design is clearly based on oak leaves.

Kirsty Hall: Ornate Railings, June 2008

I like it when you can tell what the original design is meant to be; sometimes they're so over-painted that it's just a vague organic blob. This decorative cast iron rose is still recognisable but it's becoming softer and less distinct with every layer of paint.

Kirsty Hall: Cast Iron Rose, June 2008

Two of our ceilings have been painted so often that none of us can decipher the original pattern of the plaster mouldings. One day I decided it was 'baby feet and broccoli' and that has stuck.

See what I mean...

Kirsty Hall: Cream Plaster Mouldings, June 2008

The white baby feet in the kitchen aren't quite as obscured but I've still no idea what it's meant to be.

Kirsty Hall: White Plaster Mouldings, June 2008

Maybe one day I'll get up a very tall ladder and strip all the layers of paint off, but somehow I doubt it: I think we're stuck with baby feet and broccoli.