02/08/2017

Make a badger

Stress, tiredness, difficult things...can make you lose it. IT. Your Mojo. Your infallible creative wossname, that keeps flinging out ideas - some good, some hilariously unworkable, a few that are "meh" and every now and then, a really great idea. What do you do if you lose it??
Panic that it won't come back. Hope it's just stress. Remember what a friend told you 5 years after artschool - that if Picasso stopped painting for 6 months, it wouldn't stop him being a painter. and if you did something else for six months...
Fuelled by a half-formed idea about freelancing, making-stuff-to-sell and well, recreational art, I started making some glass things. Is it art? is it craft? is it therapy? Who cares. As an artist, it's sometimes just great to do something that doesn't have to be art, that doesn't have anything to prove...a birthday card, a thing to give as a moving in present, an infographic for a seminar on research informed teaching. Just to remind ourselves what joy is in drawing, painting, making...like we did when we were kids, watching Blue Peter and thinking "Ooh, Im going to make one of those...only maybe orange and with a funny hat on..." It's hard to do this as an adult; to use the same tools, and processes as you use for capital A Art, but without any expectation, without your inner tutor scoffing "decorative! derivative!". To do this - (and I quote from a long-ago degree show at Brighton, sketchbook entry of a sculpture graduate whose name I cannot now remember...)

Because its fun. And importantly, because it gives your creative wossname a holiday. The work can be a kind of meditation...a kind of sympathetic magic where the feedback from your senses - the movement of your hands and the smell of the safety flux (!), the mess - makes the ideas come. Summons the mojo.

Next time I lose it, Im gonna make a badger.

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