Success Your Way

Other People’s Letters. Paper collage 10 x 10cm 2022

Sacred or Profane. Stitched paper collage, 10 x 10cm 2010

What stands between you and success? Only time and a whole lot of practise. I was looking through some of my early artworks where I included text as art and found collages from more than ten years ago, my first attempts at visual storytelling.

Back then, I was searching for a language of my soul, but I didn’t know how to access it. I remember my poetry lecturer telling his students to have a notebook by their bed so they could catch the snatches of poetry that arrive when your brain is at rest just before you fall asleep. It could be why I am attracted to text as art. Graffiti, asemic writing, Cyrillic script, Asian calligraphy and Pitmans shorthand. Allusive words hidden from my understanding.

My first job as a journalist on a daily newspaper required that I learn shorthand. I enrolled to study it at night school, but life as an independent wage-earning adult was too alluring. There were so many exciting distractions (such as love) to concentrate on learning this foreign language. 

Now when I look at shorthand, I am reminded of that time, yearning for a script I could never decipher. I still have the shorthand textbook with its calligraphic language. There is something about this squiggly script I can’t quite put my finger on. Something that whispers of poetry and love. When I put it in a collage it becomes a map of the hidden soul. Like snatches of a haunting tune that sounds familiar and makes your heart ache with longing and loss.

Soul language, the language that speaks of books and mythology, of words that carry on the wind. It can make an impact on someone, somewhere.

I return to the folders of old artworks on my computer, labelled by the years of submitted applications. Artworks sent out with a hopeful heart to exhibitions in far flung corners of the globe. Some were successful, many were not.

I learnt painfully that I needed to have practised my art long enough and with enough failures to detach my self-worth from the art itself. Step by step I was included in an exhibition here and there, step by step I became more confident in myself and using my materials.

I still have some favourites amongst my early works. Themes I return to but with a confidence borne of artistic maturity. A realisation that the journey between those early years and now is only separated by time and my practice.

Pennsylvania Love. Paper collage 10x10cm 2013

Graffiti. Mixed medium collage on canvas, 45 x 45cm 2015