What to do with the silence when all art is connection?

Attentive followers may have noticed that I have been posting less on social media since the start of the year, and that I have released fewer new prints. I have briefly touched on some of the reasons for this silence on instagram; but it’s time I explain a bit more about what has been going on…

First, I will say that this started as a deliberate slowing-down on my part. Throughout 2022, I tried to think differently about the prints I was producing, to work more deliberately and make more intentional choices about form. You can read my blog post about the poetics of printing to discover the motivation behind this approach.

This process came into its own over Christmas, when I worked on a piece to respond to a specific prompt. It gave me the tools to explore the idea conceptually, defining a form as I explored an idea, and then translating that idea through the form. It was a very interesting exercice, which pushed me to look at production and reception of the artwork, navigating between the medium and the meaning, so that the language articulating the two became itself part of the work. I really enjoyed working on this project, pushing its limits and I am proud of the work that resulted from it- I haven’t shared this project online yet as I still need to decide the best time to release it, and I hope to be able to do so soon.

As I finished work on that project, I realised it had been made possible because I had allowed myself space and silence to think. The concept I came up with, and the way I could express it into a print, couldn’t have happened within a quick production mode. It was obvious to me then that, if I wanted to carry on working this way, I would need to slow down, so that I could give new projects the chance to emerge and take shape. It is of course a fine balance to navigate- some ideas need time to grow for a direction to emerge, others are best explored in the studio by letting things get messy. So I haven’t stopped studio time completely, I am still producing works, exploring the themes that started to emerge in my work last year, but I am also giving myself time and distance to nurture future projects, feeding them through all sorts of inspiration and through… silence.

Secondly I have been working on a poetry-related project in parallel; I am not sure this blog is the right place to talk about it in great depth (and I don’t quite yet know where it is going) but it has been something I have immersed myself completely in over the last year, like a (drunken) boat bathing in the poem of the sea. Over the last year, many of my days have been filled with research and work on this project, and it hasn’t left me with a lot of mental space for visual art. As this project develops and takes shape, work on it will probably ebb and flow a bit, and I expect to have periods when I need to concentrate on it intensely, and periods where I can emerge from it a bit, and get back some head space for my art practice.

Whatever happens next with it, it has been an extremely interesting endeavour, I have learned a lot about very niche but fascinating topics, and it has allowed me to discover in myself resources I didn’t know I had. I am hoping that, in turn, this will feed my own creative journey, even though I am not sure of the impact it will have: it feels like it has the potential to simultaneously feed and stifle my own creativity. Stifle it, because looking at the work of incredibly talented, radical and groundbreaking artists- whatever their field- can be very humbling, awe inspiring but also paralysing; It may also somehow feed it, not least because it has impacted how I think of creativity and how I connect to art. It has also brought new inspiration into my life: I have done a lot of research, and I think I can start to see how I could appropriate some of the fragments I have collected on this journey, to become the starting point of a new project. This is something that I am allowing to simmer in my mind right now- how to connect these two parts of my life more intimately, so that work done in one area can bleed into project ideas on the other side.

It has been an intensive period of research and reflection, and I dont think I know exactly where it is taking me. So while I allow it to run its course, all I can do is keep an awed silence, allow any bursts of creativity to flourish, and see where I end up.

That said, you may have noticed the parentheses in the title of my post. This silence is a space between words, an aside in a story, and the sentence is far from finished. It is a pause between breaths, new blood rushing into the corpus of work I am creating, a new spark with which to start a fire.