It’s Saturday morning, a chilly morning with squally rainy and hail being blown across us. The perfect weather to sit up in bed with a cup of tea and write to you. (I hope you are keeping warm or cool, and have somewhere comfy to sit with a cup of something too.)
I mentioned that my Do Not Disturb days were successful because I have a clearer idea of how I want to create. Today I want to tease that out a little.
My desire to develop a strong creative practice has always been one of my goals. There have been all sorts of valid reasons why a practice hasn’t stuck. Last year many of those reasons had gone from my life and I could feel myself groping for what I wanted to do. I was feeling my way with things like small embroidery samples and another attempt at stitching the Maribyrnong River. There was something happening, I just needed to give myself time to work out what it was.
Then in January I read an article in Uppercase magazine by Meera Lee Partel “Finding your true north”. She asked the question that has resolved so much:
Why is creating important to me?
I realise that in the past I had been trying to solve the question “What sort of artist am I?” Am I a botanic artist? A collage artist? An embroiderer? A sketcher? But my creative soul kept wanting to not settle for one thing. Meera’s question turned my thoughts from an external gaze to an internal one.
To ask “What sort of artist am I?” is the need to find a label that explains my work to the wider world. I do botanic art. Or I collage. Or I embroider. It also fits in with the need to create a Product, which is a thought for another day.
Shifting my gaze internally made me realise that creating is important because I love to record.
I mean recording in a wider sense than writing a diary, although that is important. I think of it as taking my curiosity about my world and recording it in some way. Showing the connections that I see between things.
Which is what artists do. I am not sure where this quote came from, but it fits:
” Artists are people who notice things and find significance there, they draw connections. Artists are people who make art as a symbol, a keepsake, a mark of that experience of noticing.“
You know that I love keeping written records, of my reading, my garden, my thoughts, my travels. Art gives me another way to record, it just uses different skills and media. For instance botanic art is about recording a specific plant in visual form. My collage work, although not at all scientific like botanic art, was about recording the wetlands and rock pools.
As I see myself as an artist who notices and records, I can also see that specific media and skills become items in my toolbox. Instead of thinking “I want to do some collage but I don’t know what” I am thinking “how can I use collage in this work on the Maribyrnong?” Instead of limiting myself to one type of creating I can combine and select the best tool for the element I want to create.
That’s why I am finding artist books to be such a powerful creative expression. I have made a couple now and find them deeply satisfying, and I dip into my toolbox of skills and media to make them. They also move me away from a 2 dimensional way of expressing. I think that is another important part of all of this, but need to ponder it some more.
There is more I want to show you about these ‘books’, so watch out for the next couple of blogs. In the meantime breakfast is calling! Enjoy your weekend wherever you may be.
I respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land on which I live and create – the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung People of the Kulin Nation, their spirits, ancestors, elders and community members past and present. The land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Anne Lawson Art 