Virginia and me
Within Virginia Woolf's diaries - she writes extensively about writing: about the process of writing, about the process of ideas and about the relationship between her writing and her state of mind. Often she writes to overcome her depression, her affliction and her anxiety. Sometimes her writing seems to contribute to her anxiety. Sometimes it seems to offer solutions and comfort.
"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order." Virginia Woolf - Diary - Friday 27 July 1934
"These are travellers notes which I offer myself should I again be lost". Virginia Woolf - Diary January 26, 1940
In relation to our discussions around this show - which itself came about from discussions about the yearning to make small work and messages that run under surfaces (inspired by Stevie Smith's 'not waving but drowning') - there seemed to me to be a connectivity to how artists might work to overcome anxiety, depression, grief and trauma. Or perhaps more singularly, and more subjectively - how I work to overcome anxiety, depression, grief and trauma.
During the making of this show - we have - some of us - come together to meet at studio spaces. At the first studio visit, it was astonishing how all of us seemed to be at least touching on some of this thinking and whilst the framing of Smith's poem might have naturally driven us there - it also seemed a really interesting consideration from very different artists and their practice to land here - in the middle of how art might help us work through stuff.
In the period of researching, discussing and creating this show, I was going through at the same time a very specific personal grief which led to a period of equally very specific anxiety. At that meeting in Alex Simpson's lovely studio - I was distracted and distressed due to yet another event, in this particular six-month maelstrom, that had taken place that morning. It was a physical thing - I found the proximity of other people difficult, invasive and I wanted to run from Alex's lovely space and head for home. Yet despite this overwhelming physical demand from my anxiety, I kept forcing my attention back to the work and a belief that the work, and the group, would help me.
I have a mistrust of this drive of mine to always be producing - (I suspect it to be a drive of capitalism's but not one I want to look at here) - but alongside that mistrust, runs a surety that my artwork, and writing particularly, help me to re-centre myself when I am listing to one side and weighed down by ballast. This seems something I must look at and the work in Sluice has come out of that consideration. Although, I confess, now we are in the residency part of creation - it makes me nervous to try and look at it (the anxiety, the grief and most of all the last six months) for fear of contributing to more distress - instead of trying to swim away from it as fast as I can. That too will need to be acknowledged and dealt with in the process - the contribution to anxiety/the comfort from it.
Dr Sarah Wishart (I apologise for the over-egging of the water metaphor in this piece)