End of term

On the train home after the last day of teaching for this year. Phew!

I am getting to the point with the exhibition preparation where I am beginning to reflect on how it has gone. I have a pile of paintings that are coming to a finish, and I can start to see how the exhibition will look.

I have never been very good at ‘sitting’ with work. I tend to do stuff for a purpose (an assessment, a deadline, an open call etc.) and then move on from it. I always feel like I should be making something new and that old work belongs in the past. This dynamic, plus the fact that I was enthused by some of my new ideas, meant that I chose to make a completely new body of work for this show. On the one hand this has been a good thing. The paintings look like a cohesive body of work, and I think that they’re interesting. On the other hand, it does mean that I have allowed myself to fall into the trap of making a lot of work in a relatively small time-window and this has inevitably tested both my quality control and my enthusiasm. The last few weeks have felt a bit mechanical, and I have sometimes found myself skirting a not unfamiliar place where I find it difficult to know if things are good or bad.

I guess that the space to ‘sit’ with work might just be a privilege that many early career artists don’t have. I feel that I have to take opportunities whenever they present themselves and I always feel that I need to be at my most ‘current’. A colleague who is exhibiting in the third quarter slot next year recently told me that he will be showing some work that he made three years ago. He told me that, to him, the work feels current as he’s never used it for anything. I was surprised by how dissonant I found this idea and that feeling was, I think, the beginning of this reflection. I guess that if I could sit on work for three years and still feel able to use it then that could be quite a sweet spot, but I just can’t even imagine being able to feel that way.