Backwards Narratives
Looking Backwards to Find Forwards
It’s so hard to know if the memories around an event help us see the event more clearly, or less clearly, than the original event. I’ve always thought this about holidays. It might be my personality type, but when I’m on holiday, I’m so busy planning, checking in with what is happening, thinking about what’s happening next (where we are eating, how we will get there etc etc), that I find it hard staying in the present. Added to that, the mind is busy reprogramming expectations of what you imagined the place to be like, with the reality in front of your eyes. But when I get back from the trip - days or weeks later - my sense of the specifics of the trip somehow solidifies, and I see each day for what it was. I carry the memory (or perhaps the essence) of it with more tenderness than I felt at the time. The worries, anxieties, plans, niggles… all stripped away to leave the day, the time and the place itself.
I’m beginning to wonder if the same goes for the work we make too.
Are we missing an opportunity in not seeing the value of looking back over work made, cleared of the clutter we carried when we made it, to re-search for the meaning we were so struggling to find at the time?
In December I was invited to present at the All Party Parliamentary Group for Art, Craft and Design Education - one of many voices speaking up to advocate for the importance of art education. I had fifteen minutes to fill, and I knew from the start that I wanted my presentation to take a personal as well as professional stance. This stuff matters to me personally - I feel like it is my lived experience, but I was also aware that many people presenting would be drawing on research and facts - and valuable as that is, I wanted to contrast with something a little more from heartfelt. I needed images, and although the AccessArt website is full of over 44,000 images of artwork made by all audiences, I was pulled to my own drawings, made over the last year or so during The Everyday School of Art on Substack.
For the first time in a long time, I felt the urge to come from behind the cover of AccessArt and to share my own illustrations alongside my thoughts.
The drawings I included were made at different points over the last couple of years. When I made them, I was definitely think stuff - i.e. they were not doodles - but at the same time they felt like flotsam - small thoughts which I put out into the world, which I was trying to cling on to, to better understand them. Many of them felt totally unrelated to each other. For the most part I let them exist, often in separate sketchbooks (I have a habit of starting new sketchbooks with different types of drawings (or so I thought).
But bizarrely, when I went looking through these sketchbooks for images I might use to illustrate my presentation, they were all there… visuals for the thoughts I was trying to articulate in my speech. I never for one minute when I made the drawings thought I was illustrating a presentation about art education, and yet the meanings in the drawings felt solid to me, in their new context and with words to help hold them in place.
So what does this make me think going forward?
To continue to trust the process. When we have an urge to make a drawing, however small, let’s not talk ourselves out of it. The urge comes from somewhere and we should trust that, even if we can’t quite see where, or how or why…
That every now and then, looking back over old material and taking it out of its original context, shuffling it and representing it, might give it the opportunity to breathe and live… and us the opportunity to re-search and re-see…
Compassion is a much used word at the moment, and the Northern, Protestant, over-achiever in me shouts “RIGOUR” when I mumble the word “compassion” - but - would bringing a greater sense of compassion to the work we make, when we make it, help us move forward (more carrot less stick)? Or, do we need to hold space for “at-the-time-disgruntlement” with what we do to help us make those bigger leaps of understanding which often come from battle and dissatisfaction?
So as the year draws to a close - what have you got lurking in sketchbooks and drawers which you could bring a new perspective to, and in doing, allow the work to bring new sense of understanding to where you are now? What did you discard at the time because it was drenched in uncertainty, which you could revisit with a new sense akin to post-holiday tenderness?
And how far back are you drawn to go?
See the APPG presentation: “When We Hold Art Education In Our Hands”
You might also enjoy the “Making a Backwards Sketchbook” resource on AccessArt
Holding on to Words to Hold What We Can't Say
Now that we’re a few weeks into term, there have been more conversations happening in the studios about what the work we make is about, and I’ve been finding it difficult to articulate my current ideas. I’ve come to realise that the idea of articulation itself is actually integral to the work I’m experimenting with. Exploring ideas about transition, experience and intuition, I am attempting to hold these lightly enough, that I let space for definitions and connections to occur. If I already knew how to precisely and eloquently link and verbalise the thoughts in my head, and experiences in my body, I would; but the reality is I have to trust my instinct to allow words, images and objects their own space to emerge and form meaning. I do not want to rush in and find meaning, for the sake of other.