ArtKeeper Final Thoughts

Today is my last day of my 8 month residency at HoTA where I was employed as an artist 3 days a week to create on-site. This residency was not outcome based and really allowed for me to sit with this project and develop a really strong grounding for it to move forward in a meaningful way. I am so thankful to HoTA for having me in this program, it has been life changing and deeply affirming.

I wanted to reflect a little and share one of my big takeaways from the past 8 months. 

The BIG lesson was giving myself permission to allow change as I navigated the project. I allowed for my first initial concepts to not be the final product, I can be really stubborn sometimes and think my first idea is always how the finished product will be shown - sometimes these are my best ideas and what ends up being created but over this residency I allowed for fluid thinking and development.

During this residency I applied for another and while I didn’t get the second I had some good feedback. I was told I was placed in the top percentile of applicants but they wanted to see more range in my arts practice. I realised as a small business owner and creative I had niched down really far - which is great for business but also sometimes not the best thing for an arts practice. So I really took this on board and have been thinking more broadly as of late. This past 8 months has really allowed me to think deeper about the development of ideas and how I create. 

So give yourself allowances.
Don’t beat yourself up if things change and things move in new directions, embrace them.
Allow for development. 

I feel ready to take on all the new ideas that have been ruminating in the background over the past year and finally feel like I have the capacity to allow new directions in my practice.

I listened to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks early into the residency and would like to share some of my own reflections and quotes I had written on my studio walls that kept me inspired during the residency:

Allow balance
Allow space
Think process not product

“Practice productive procrastination”
“Do the work you want to see done”
“You have to start doing the work you want to be doing”
Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

“As an artist you are just trying to survive yourself.”
Ai Weiwei

“I do not intend to make prehistoric pieces. If people think they appear so, that is not my intention. I like my work to change colour and mature. I want to leave more of the expression up to the material itself. I have to take it into my hands, but I am not certain to what extent I should do this. I do not want to kill the material. When I think about what I want to create, it is not so much that I feel I must ‘consult’ with the material but it is rather like being manipulated.

When I look at a completed work, it is apparent to me that I stopped when I became fearful of destroying the materials. When I say that I want to allow for materials to live, it sounds as though I am being very differential towards them. It is actually more a struggle. The struggle itself is enjoyable and interesting for me. It is this struggle that drives me in the creation of work.”
- Emiko Tokushige 

“Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin. A global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relationships to it”
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

Move beyond sustainable and into regenerative thinking.
What are we sustaining?
Is it worth it?