That title is true. I’m sitting in my front room looking out on to a slowly-waking suburban street in Cardiff and it’s sunny.
Part of my day’s workload is to spend a good while in a dark and dirty loft figuring out how to board it out so I can empty a storage unit I keep across town. The unit costs me £100 a month - £1200 a year - and it’s full of artwork and art-practice related stuff, barely accessible as it’s so full, and most likely destined to sit there, unseen, for an indeterminate amount of time.
But it’s sunny outside right now.
This has got to be one of the biggest ‘problems’ of being an artist. You make all this stuff, you show all this stuff, but then you have to store all this stuff. If only it was as simple as - make the stuff, show the stuff, sell the stuff. But the commercial art world doesn’t work for most artists. It’s what they never (used to?) tell you at art school - the commercial art world only really works for galleries (and surprisingly few in real terms) and even fewer artists (and don’t assume it’s working for all those artists named on a gallery roster, because most of them aren’t selling a thing). But people talk about this tiny slice of the art world a disproportionate amount as it’s where the big bucks get generated (by a few people, from a few people, for a few people). I’m aware that without hearing the tone of my voice that might sound bitter, but it’s really not. I’m lucky enough to have worked a bit in that world and so had the chance to figure out my relationship with it.
But today, it’s sunny outside, so I’ll not think about all that.
Part of my plan is to empty the unit and put all the stuff in the loft, but archive it at the same time, and give some of it away to organisations I’ve worked with for their own archives. And also, in the process of archiving it, sell as much of it as possible - artwork, kit, materials, the lot. There are works I made nearly 30 years ago in there, alongside PAs and smoke-machines I’ve bought for various projects. And it’s all just sitting there, costing money to store.
I took the unit on about 4 or 5 years ago when I moved out of the last studio I had. I moved out of my studio as it was hosted by an organisation that had shown itself to not really care about the people who had made it so interesting in the first place. This isn’t a unique story, but it’s always sad. So I’ve been studio-less since then, working on site and in my house since that time. You’d be amazed (maybe) at what you can get done in and around your house. Amongst other things I’ve made a series of old-master style still-life photographs of food for a book of fiction, an album cover, engraved a guitar, and completed a road movie (I just edited that at home, so not such a strange home-based task, but worth a mention). I actually think a really useful route to creativity is restriction or limitation of some sort, whether that be physical, material, whatever. By placing constraints on something it gives you useful parameters within which to be as creative as you can. But I digress…(and will almost certainly come back to this point another day).
It’s been a strange week overall. Something new that I was really excited about has turned out to not be so exciting, but I’ll figure it out. This kind of falls under the restriction/limitation idea. When something turns out not to be what you thought it was, you can view it as a different set of constraints to squeeze something of interest and use out of. It’s what we, as artists, are best trained to do, right?
And it’s sunny outside,