Artful Pretence
Mountain House, 2022 16.5 x16.5cm
Red Door House, 2022 17.5 x 17.5cm
I recently read “everything is fine, until it isn’t”. I would say that summed up 2023 for me.
I was looking through work that I had made in 2022 and 2023. It overflowed benches and boxes.
Yet I knew that I had been on a hampster wheeel, producing work after work, consistently moving from one project to another, seemingly without much time in between.
I have spent the past two weeks since Christmas redoing my webpage. It’s like a retrospective; making sense of the categories of work that I had done over the years.
I came up with three categories; Art, Paper and Writing. Each of these also have their own categories. Art includes exhibitions, artist books, residencies and publications while paper is about paper art and papermaking. The writing category only has the blog so far, but it is a work in progress…
What this revealed to me is that I have exhibited every year (even in 2020) for the past 10 years, either in group shows or solo exhibitions.
It’s no wonder I feel exhausted!
When examining these paper houses which I have submitted (for another exhibition in 2024), I realised that home has always been a theme for me in my art. How do we turn a house into a home? By occupying it.
It’s not only the physical occupation of four walls that is important. It is also about being truely ‘present’. I feel I have been running away since forever. Thinking that if I pretended to be an artist, one day this might come true.
So I pursued academic study (which I love) adding more and more skills until I could prove to the world at large ( or maybe myself ) that I can honestly put the occupation ‘artist’ on official forms.
With the finish of this final project for my Masters in Arts and Place, I can honestly say that I am an artist because I think and act like an artist. It doesn’t matter if my/your art is not popular, or it doesn’t sell or you don’t have gallery representation.
If you ‘pretend” to be an artist for long enough by making art; then ipso facto you are a practising artist! I call it ‘artful pretence’.
Once you come to that conclusion you can relax! No more trying to prove a point. You can make art in whatever way you want to. It’s about the making, the practising of your art practice.
In the film which I made as my final project for my Masters, I document myself making art in five different places in Pottsville near my home. I submerge paper in mud or in the creek. The paper tears, falls apart, bits of it fall in the water. It’s not ‘pretty’.
What remains are the marks of the maker. Like the paper vignettes of houses, these papers have become occupied with presence. They have become memories of a place through the process of their creation.
I have since stitched these fallen apart pieces of paper together and put them in frames. Hanging on the wall, they pretend to be art until they are. Now they too can relax!
Blue Roof House 2022 16.5 x16.5cm . Elevating your art by putting a frame around it.
