How do you know what to make next? How do you stay inspired, perhaps after delivering a commission or responding to a brief?

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In this post I’m going to draw on the conversations I’ve had with artists and creatives about building a practice that keeps on rolling. What we want as artists is a sense of ease moving between bodies of work, ideas, ways of working and techniques. But more than that, I want to dig into why creative autonomy is important to keep your work flowing.

Artists need creative autonomy. It’s not a luxury, it’s what makes the work art rather than output. But not everyone starts from the same place, and I think it’s worth naming two distinct experiences here.

For creatives who respond to briefs and meet deadlines, the rhythm of demand and delivery can become a kind of groove that’s hard to step out of. You get good at making to specification, at reading what’s needed, at delivering. But creative autonomy requires something different: it requires you to be the one setting the terms. If you’re a creative who wants to move toward a more artist-led practice, or you want to bring more of yourself into the work, building creative autonomy is how you do it. It’s the thing to work on. The internal capacity to know what you want to make, and to trust it.

For artists, the challenge is different. Reaching a point of completion with a body of work can lead to crashing, a feeling of sudden emptiness, and even a creeping doubt that ideas will never come again. That silence after finishing can feel like a sign that you’ve run out, when actually it’s just a gap between one thing and the next.

In both cases, cultivating creative autonomy is what carries you through. Artists may establish creative autonomy intuitively. It can be there in the work without ever being named. But becoming more intentional about it can make a real difference to how you feel. When you understand what feeds you, what questions animate your practice, what you return to, the crashes and the depths and the doubts can be less destabilising. They may still come, but you have a way to move through.

So what we want is to be intentional. Intentional in the sense of clarifying the questions, drives, impulses and curiosities that drive the work. We’re looking to feed the obsessions, to know what we love researching, to identify what nourishes our imagination and delights us.

And for a moment, I want to refuse a few terms that can really gum us up as artists. It can feel quite benign to talk about meaning in our work. To focus on what our work means. I find, though, the word meaning in relation to our own work can get us into knots. Make us feel we might not have done enough or thought enough, or weird that we don’t really know why we’ve made the work.

Instead, I think in cultivating creative autonomy, we put the establishing of meaning on the side of the audience. We make, and with all our generosity, we hand it over to an audience for them to find their own meaning from it.

What we want to be ambitious about, though, is rewarding looking and attention to our work; to reward the return, the close look, the slow observation. And we do that in our making.

I think there is more room for us, more freedom, in letting go of the idea we determine the meaning of our work. The truth is, the work comes from our depths, our unconscious, and so what it means, even if we think there is a singular meaning, there actually isn’t. There are multiple things going on, and much of it we won’t be aware of.

So creative autonomy isn’t cultivated through pinning down what we do and why, whether that comes from outside or inside.

Rather, creative autonomy emerges as our playful, exploratory response to what we take in. It’s our open-ended response to stimulus. So feed your unconscious: keep encountering what delights you. Return to the books that made you feel. Or the places.

But more importantly, whatever you make, encounter it yourself. Let yourself respond to it. What does that artwork ask to be made next? What question does it pose?

One approach that can work is remaking something that worked. To understand it better, to improve, to go deeper. To return to a material you felt inspired by. Remaking, I think, is never a faithful recreation but can be a way back to a spark of inspiration you’ve forgotten. It’s the sense of inspiration or spark, or aliveness of depth, that animates an artwork, that turns it from something with a singular meaning like a poster in a doctor’s surgery into something ambiguous, multilayered, and indeterminate. And that’s the quality of art that refreshes the mind of our audience. The trick is to be under that spell too. But as the maker, our job is to build a layered context of wonder around the work. The playground, as it were.

There’s no fixed way to do that, establishing your creative autonomy. In my mentoring this is one of the threads we can hold, looking at the cultivation, increasing your confidence in your own play and wonder and experimentation. Often it’s as though artists need permission to not feel inhibition or self-consciousness. Get in touch if you can feel that creative autonomy needs some intentional developing in your work, I can help.

What creative autonomy produces is work that comes from a place that is countercultural, that flows against the tides of obedience and conformity. So I think we have a duty to bring more creative autonomy into the world, because of how necessary it is. Creative autonomy is political.

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PS The image I’ve shared I’ve written about here, and it’s an image that for me, holds that sense of wonder and curiosity. It’s an image that keeps me looking and making.

In this post, I reflect on how we can realistically soothe ourselves in such a tumultuous time.

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The news cycle keeps destabilising. We have so much to metabolise daily that it feels relentless just being present. How do we find space for ourselves, and why does it matter that we do?

I saw a video recently by Carrie Scott in which she talks about creative health alongside mental and physical health, the idea that engaging with culture helps us to function, hope, thrive. She mentioned the book Art Cure, which brings scientific evidence to this. It validated something I’d been thinking about: art and culture gives us space to process the world without descending into crisis and inaction. It’s how we recuperate and breathe.

So whatever you’re working on, whatever your creative contribution: keep going. It’s necessary and needed, and I don’t think we can hear that enough. Your creativity matters. I’m your cheerleader.

But it’s the self-work that keeps us going. In the last post, I was gleeful that I’d cracked my own practice code. That high was short-lived. All of them slipped when I hit an existential crisis.

So, we plan for the existential crises.

When I feel futility, structure feels a stretch too far. Tracking feels beside the point. I need something more robust than tracking.

I noticed, though, that I was drinking more water. It happened without me trying. And I’d recently heard something about hydration and fascia that stayed with me, and so I put some intention behind it. Every time I felt thirsty, I thought: I’m going to go for it. A full glass of water. That was the thing I could do. Listening to my body. A positive gesture. A pause. A small act of care for myself.

It’s become a ritual.

I have a list in my journal of things that support me when I forget myself. The problem I discovered: mid-crisis, I’m deeply unconvinced about the efficacy of any of them. So now I write why they work, which I’ve written in the glow of having just done them, a note to my future sceptical, lethargic, overwhelmed self.

Walking in the woods is on the list. Beside it I’ve written: brain detox, gratitude for everything around me, the biggest mood-shifter. Radio 3 is now on the list. I used to feel like an outsider to classical music, like I was missing the key coordinates. Then one day in the car I found myself hearing the body in it: bows on strings, intakes of breath, an artist and their instrument working together. That was my in. Now it’s on all the time.

Also on the list: journaling, dancing, podcasts, audiobooks, massage.

It feels like my life prescription.

What would be on yours? What would you write to your future self, explaining why you need it? What helps you process? What cultivates wonder? Compile the list. Write yourself the reasons. And maybe, when you can’t do any of it, you’ll find yourself called to do something like drinking water. A full glass. And see then, what becomes possible. If you can put the brakes on futility.

Because we need you in your clear-eyed state, creating, hoping, making. We need each other’s creativity.

If you’re feeling creatively stuck, I’ve added an option to my mentoring sessions, a slightly longer session that begins with an intuitive tarot card pull. It works especially well for blocks you can’t quite put words to. We use the images as anchors, returning to them through the session to find routes forward, creative or practical. Send me a message if it appeals.

If you’re thinking about a DYCP application, the fund is opening again, and it’s a great way to take time to deepen or acquire a skill. What can add real value is pairing that learning with mentoring sessions: space to reflect on how your new skills weave into your practice, and what they might open up. I’d love to hear from you if that’s work you’d like to do together.

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At the age of 47 and a half, I finally worked out how to be me.

What I mean by that is: I worked out the tasks I need to do, and the tasks I want to do. And I worked out that I can only do them if I treat them seriously enough to track them. The daily ones, the weekly ones, the monthly ones. When I have capacity and without self-judgement. But tracking them does help me to remember the plot.

This sounds simple. It wasn’t. This all began with a much harder question: what do I actually want to create? Which unlocked another: how am I going to make that happen? And then a long stretch of journaling to understand why I hadn’t made it happen before, given that I wanted it so much, and how to stop feeling overwhelmed by the tasks that would take me there.

The synthesis of all that work lives in my bullet journal. I track whether I’ve moved my body, made art, listened to a Ceri Hand podcast, done some reading, and enacted some form of career agency. (I also track face exercises. That’s my wild card. Don’t worry about it.)

Among my weekly intentions: go and see art. An artist date. For inspiration and research. To stay excited. It feeds something that nothing else does.

What keeps hope in play, I’ve come to realise, is the practices. My routines. The ones I set before the new month begins, so I arrive into it with some intention already in place. And if I’ve had a juicy or intense week, I’ll reflect on it, in my bullet journal, or in morning pages (not daily, but as needed). That act of reflection, small as it is, reminds me that I am moving. That things are shifting, even when they don’t feel like it.

All of this: the tracking, the reflection, the intention-setting, creates a feeling of being an agent in my own life. Not in control of everything. Not immune to the wobbles. But an agent. And I notice the blues really set in when I forget to be an agent.

And here’s the part that took longest to learn: I don’t plan or reflect when I’m wobbling. I don’t set intentions from inside the spiral. Because I don’t want a toddler driving the bus.

The toddler-time does exist. She just doesn’t make the strategic decisions.

And that’s the whole thing, this is how to be an artist outside of institutions and structures, without a framework that holds you. You build your own framework. You make it yours. You refuse the shame of arriving here late, and you forgive yourself that progress is slow.

I’m still in the thick of this. But if I’m a couple of steps ahead of you, and you want somewhere to think it through; what you want to make, what might be getting in the way, what a practice could look like for you, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I have in my mentoring work.

The first step, and the most elusive: what do you want to do? If that question has been drowned out by the noise of life for a while, it can be a strange one to sit with. But it’s your compass. When you know what you really want to do, you set your compass, and everything else starts to organise around it.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear. And if you’re interested in mentoring, you’re welcome to get in touch.

In the post, I reflect on the energy of 2026, and I think about how to use it. Let me know if this resonates and what has shifted for you.

I can feel that my energy is different now.

Something has settled. Not that things are resolved, but I’m not negotiating with myself in the same way. Authority, for me, isn’t about confidence or certainty. It’s not about being louder, faster, or more visible. It’s about orientation. My bottom line, my navigating compass, is simple: Do I feel safe right now?

In this conversation. Reading this message. Opening this email.

Safety doesn’t mean comfort or ease. It means having enough internal steadiness to respond rather than react. When I feel safe, I can listen. I can speak clearly. I can remain connected to myself while being in relation. I am safe when I don’t abandon myself.

If I don’t feel safe, that’s information.

It’s a cue to pause. To wait. To step back rather than push forward.

And so the work task that has come up for me, is, and I offer as a prompt for you:

Communicate from a place of safety—or don’t communicate yet. Plan from safety. Strategise from safety.

This is discernment in action.

Not every project needs momentum. Not every opportunity requires a response. Forcing forward when something feels unsafe rarely creates clarity—it usually creates confusion. Doing something on autopilot disconnects the feelings that could be guiding us.

Claiming authority means trusting the information of your own nervous system. It means letting timing matter. It means knowing when to stay, when to go, and when to do nothing at all.

I’ve actually asked for support with the development of my art practice—guidance, reflection, witnessing. This, too, is part of authority. Not outsourcing decisions, but allowing myself to be seen while I make them.

From this place, questions become simpler. Decisions become cleaner. And work begins to move again, without coercion.

And so this feels like Fire Horse energy of 2026: acceleration is accessible; momentum and speed. The task is to keep returning to clarity and discernment. Meet the energy with inner sovereignty, not urgency.

This is the authority I’m interested in now. Quiet. Internal. Hard-won. And impossible to take away.

I work with artists who want to make decisions from a place of internal authority rather than urgency or external validation. If you’re looking for mentoring that supports discernment, safety, and self-trust in your practice, you’re welcome to get in touch.

I wrote this in a giddy moment as part of my journaling for the last post. I was trying to describe to myself the way in which I had wanted to go deeper last year, but that I also resented what was coming up for me as a result. So, this is a comedic vignette of an inner dialogue I had. Honestly, if in the last post I hadn’t promised this would be the next post, I would have abandoned it because it seems a little hokey to me now. But, as ever, I’m sharing because I have a feeling I might be bringing into consciousness what others have been experiencing without being able to name.

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Allie’s Inner Guidance (AIG) at the start of last year:
OK. The challenge of this time is to experience projects reaching fruition—old threads completing, things finally tying up. The real work for you is to learn from this so you can embody your creative and critical sovereignty. It’s going to be a challenge to dial this lesson in. Are you in?

Allie on the Ground (AOTG):
I’m in.

AIG:
It’s going to feel like you’re travelling the long way round, through treacherous, boggy terrain. You could take the fast route—get through the year quickly, learn nothing, and become more dependent on external validation. What do you want to do?

AOTG:
I want to develop my sovereignty. I’ll take the long route.

End of year check-in

AIG:
How are you doing? What have you learned?

AOTG:
(crying) I’m stuck in the bog. I’m sinking. I can’t see the path.

This is how I ended 2025. And how January and early February felt too.

Then, slowly, something shifted.

AOTG:
OK. No one is coming to pull me out of this bog.

But I do know this path has been walked before, by people I respect. I’m going to have to self-soothe. Pull myself out with good humour. Sit by the edge of the bog until I feel proud of myself for having done that—before I take another step.

From there, the path becomes easier. Not because the terrain changes, but because I’ve internalised my sovereignty.

The lesson here isn’t stoicism, or refusing help. I did ask for help. The lesson is about how I met the challenge. With levity. With less self-attack. With the willingness to stay put long enough for something to integrate.

The sovereignty was always there—that was the lesson of the year. But by the time I’d earned my stripes, I was too exhausted to recognise what I’d learned.

Sometimes insight doesn’t arrive as revelation. Sometimes it arrives as the ability to sit down, catch your breath, and keep going—without abandoning yourself.

If you’re finding yourself on the long way round—tired, bogged down, but still committed to your work—I mentor artists and enable them to feel lighter and clearer about the path ahead.

The next post begins from here—from what becomes possible once that sovereignty is claimed, as 2026 brings new energy and the Fire Horse momentum.

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I can’t believe it, but after feeling very quiet and inward in 2025, as this Chinese New Year energy is getting going, I can’t stop reflecting on 2025 and what it was all about for me. So, as I’m opening up towards the new energetic chapter of 2026, the year of the Fire Horse, I find myself writing more reflections from the last year and I’ve written, in three parts, posts that explore different ways to inhabit uncertainty and move forward in your creative work.

The last year was, for me, defined by inhabiting doubt, a deep, quiet feeling of doubt that made writing hard.

Doubt can feel unsettling and isolating. It can also be silencing. Communication becomes difficult when you feel like a hermit in a cave, turned inward and isolated. 2025, felt like a year of reflection and stillness. I certainly lived it that way.

There is real use value in pausing.

In a culture that rewards acceleration, it felt necessary to step away from speed. To disentangle myself from being constituted solely by urgency. To not force myself to produce answers before I had sat with the questions.

Our inner conflicts don’t disappear when we pause. They are still there, waiting. But the work isn’t about resolving them quickly, but about understanding what they are made of.

What are our inner conflicts? How are they shaping what we think, what we make, what we reach for?

The extended pause allowed me to see my own blocks more clearly. The painful feelings I noticed recurring, across relationships, systems, situations, were often projections (probably they are always projections). This is how a self-sabotaging idea gets externalised and confirmed, again and again.

In the pause, there is time to ask what sits underneath our concerns. To stay curious with inner conflict rather than trying to eradicate it.

There isn’t a miraculous release that happens when we identify our blocks.

But getting to know them gives us access to better questions. It allows us to see how our inner experience mirrors the outer one, and so we can begin learning how to soothe, rather than fight, what limits us.

When our old foes return, as they always do, how do we meet them? What information are they carrying? Deep inside our blocks and pain, we can find solutions. Not necessarily solutions that eradicate pain, that’s unrealistic, but creative solutions. Depth in what we make comes from familiarity with our own inner depths. Meaning emerges when we stop pretending we are uncomplicated.

I feel as though I truly spent time with myself in 2025. That inner review process is already showing up in how I’m working now, how I’m approaching things even more slowly, and only now, I’m getting a sense of clarity and insight emerging from the pause.

And finally, what I’ve come to understand by staying with the pause: inner authority is something we earn by staying with doubt long enough to learn from it. That kind of validation can’t be taken away.

If what I’m describing resonates with where you are in your creative process: the pausing, re-evaluating, reviewing, redefining, I offer mentoring as a space to think alongside someone else, without pressure to rush to answers. Sometimes clarity comes not from pushing forward, but from being accompanied while you listen more closely to what’s already there.

I’ve written the next post already, and in it, I tell the story of what I’m describing looked like in practice: my messy, boggy, and oddly humorous inner monologue when clarity arrived.

As we approach the final descent of 2025, it’s time to review the year: to see what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned, and what has shifted in our professional lives.

In this post, I offer prompts for making sense of 2025, and open up what 2026 might hold. I reflect on my own feelings, and how the collective might have experienced this year of movement.

How has 2025 been for you?

If 2024 marked the moment when change was undoubtedly on the way, personally and in the grand narratives around us, then 2025 affirmed that movement. What I’ve learnt this year is that change begins with habits and systems, yes, but it also begins with something underneath them.

What have your mistakes and failures been?
What lessons did they hold?
Are you ready to release and rewrite the stories you’ve been carrying?

In my own self-examination this year, I’ve realised that my deepest fears, around visibility and success, have been concealed within my positive experiences. My fear of failure has disguised itself inside my successes. My fear of visibility has been most pronounced at moments of visibility.

Here’s an example. I was interviewed by a journalist for The Guardian about the new Taylor Swift album and her use of showgirl iconography. Although the writer was a Swift fan, she wanted a more nuanced piece about the imagery. I spoke from a neutral position, offering historical and critical context for showgirl culture. My insights were used throughout the article.

When I saw the article published, my immediate reaction was panic. I thought readers would criticise me for not being critical enough, or for not calling out cultural appropriation. I imagined people mocking me for taking showgirl culture too seriously, and also for not taking it seriously enough. I imagined negative comments forming in real time.

At the moment I had national visibility (in a modest way), I felt shame. I felt as though I had done something wrong.

When I looked at online comments, most simply mocked the idea that showgirl culture could matter compared to more ‘serious’ newsworthy issues. None of it was personal.

So why did I freak out so much? Because visibility and network-building make sense for my career goals, yet a part of me still fears being seen.

I could tell a story in which external forces thwarted my career; the missed opportunities, the injustices. I could stay angry about things I wasn’t selected for. But the truth is more complicated.

If I want to be the star of the show, why don’t I want anyone to look at me?
If I’m eager for commissions, why can’t I talk about the commissions I have received?

This year has been about identifying exactly how I’ve been my own block. About locating the frightened parts of me. About bringing them into the light.

As I close 2025, my work is to stay curious about my fears, to keep them in view. It’s like babysitting an anxious child. Now that I’ve found my fears, how do I soothe them?

The work of 2025 has been deep: feeling, perceiving, unearthing, narrating. Because of that inward pull, I’ve found it almost impossible to reach out or put myself forward. And yet I’ve had glimmers of how I want to show up in 2026, more fully, with more of my parts aligned, sharing more expansive stories from my inner depths, in both my art and my showgirl work.

Sitting with my insecurities has also brought more clarity about what I want next, my path, my next steps.

I write this as a deeply intuitive person. I am guided by my hunches. In my mentoring work, I create space for the creatives I support to let their intuition emerge, to dig for the gold, the fears, the information. We turn those into practices, places, solutions, goals, and directions for research. I don’t mentor by telling people what to do, but by honouring what comes through.

Mentoring is my service. We go deep. As the year closes and another begins, if you want space for reflection, let me know.

I write this in week eight of virus recovery. It has wiped me out. Looking back, I also broke my ankle this year, and I was hacked on Meta. 2025 has been a year of convalescence, self-examination, and time in hermit-mode, time to rest, recover, and revision.

My warm wishes as you reflect and release 2025, and welcome the new energy of 2026 in.

To my readers and subscribers: I’m incredibly grateful you are here, thank you.

I write this, having just found hidden in my inbox the fourth rejection of the four applications I sent out this summer.

I’ve written before about how to handle rejection and how to avoid ‘rejection bunching’ by pacing your applications. But each of these opportunities was so appealing, I couldn’t resist. In my mind’s eye, as I wrote, I could already see myself:
– learning to gild,
– putting on a solo show, sharing for the first time my strip club photos printed onto velvet alongside gold-on-black sketches of performers,
– developing my avant-garde sculpture drawings paired with performer images,
– receiving a fellowship that would bring visibility.

Each opportunity promised something wonderful. And all of them, this time, were not to be.

The melancholy comes from feeling as though no one took a chance on me. To reframe that sting, I have to dig deep for grace. Because my worth, my talent, my potential were never on the line in these applications. I wasn’t asking for validation, because I’m valid already. Rejection though, has a way of sneaking around the back and undermining how you feel unconsciously. That’s why I’m digging deep for grace. Deeper than the doubt that has set in a little.

I also think about grace from another direction: in my studio. It sets my teeth on edge to hear the word perfection bandied around. Perfection is my nemesis. If you are searching for perfection in the studio, what on earth are you doing? How do you innovate, or find pleasure, or imagine your future audience? Perfection is insular, inward, it’s restrictive, and punishing.

I choose grace instead of perfection.

When I sit at my studio desk, I honestly don’t know if the work I make will have visual appeal, will hold my research, will convey something I care about, or will delight a viewer. I make to find out. To see if what I’m thinking about can live up to my wildest hopes and dreams for my practice.

And if it doesn’t? I learn.

But also—I’m not always the best arbiter of my own work. Sometimes I want to throw something away, and a friend will see brilliance in it. I rely on those friends. I send snaps to them in WhatsApp: Are these any good? And sometimes their answer surprises me.

So this month, I offer you: grace.

Grace to keep going.
Grace to keep sharing.
Grace to enjoy your own work.
Grace to believe in art, in the face of everything that makes us feel we should abandon art and abandon ourselves.

And if you need a place to top up your grace, mentoring—with me, or with someone else—can be a way to recalibrate. To centre what matters to you. To shuck off the stories, inner or outer, that no longer serve. Mentoring works, because it’s a space you get to define, and if you need to assess both rejections and successes to learn from them, before you let them go, we can do that.

The image here, I’ve just finished and I need to send to friends to see if it’s any good, I don’t know yet. The series is called ‘The In Between’, and I’m trying to use the dancing body to convey interior emotions. This one might be conveying grace—maybe.

This post is for you if you admonish yourself for being behind in your career, for hitting your stride late, for belatedly working out the professional skills you “should” have developed years ago. Or if you’re pivoting in how you work.

Do not compare yourself to the creatives who are successful in their 20s and 30s. Do not compare yourself to anyone, in fact.

Your practice is your practice. It isn’t going to look like anyone else’s.

You may have had early career success. But maybe now you are evolving away from your earlier work.

The brilliance and luminosity of what we make in our youth is different to what we produce later. I’m always amazed by powerful young creators—I don’t want to undermine their contribution. But that’s not the wisdom of my path. My path is about going deeper as we get older, and loving that process. I don’t want to essentialise age groups or set them against each other, but I do want to make the case for experience.

With time, you gain maturity and voice. You are less pliant, less able to accommodate others, and more in touch with your own impulses. You work idiosyncratically, but you’re learning to love what you make, to feel grateful for the process, and to cherish what you produce. You’re drawn to experiences and artworks that light you up. Sometimes you find yourself doing what you’ve always wanted to do. Latent dreams may emerge that you once felt inhibited by.

I want to celebrate you for reaching this moment. How magnificent, what a great place to be. I don’t really care how circuitous your route has been, how many double-backs or hairpin bends. That freedom and autonomy you’re generating is gold.

And you were never wasting your time. You were never procrastinating. You were synthesising. You were feeling, processing, witnessing.

There is real value in making work after a process of healing. I don’t know how inspiration works exactly, but I do know this: we live, we learn, and then we make. If you were living, learning, and healing, that is a gift to your audience. What they see and feel when they encounter your work carries that healing—even in ways too subtle to identify.

So healing is a career move. It strengthens the quality of the work. It builds your confidence and creative autonomy. It allows you to take stock, to ask questions, to see who you are meant to be, how you are meant to work, and what you are meant to do. Healing is a career decision.

I write this from the depths of my own healing journey. I can cheerlead you because I am learning to cheerlead myself. These words are for me, too.

And in my mentoring work, I love supporting people who are pivoting, growing their skills, or reframing how they see themselves and their practice. Healing is always part of that. Sometimes we talk about it directly; sometimes it works in the background. Either way, I try to tune in to what you really want to do, and to find practical actions that help you recognise where you are, where you are going, and to feel supported as you go.

I’d love to hear if this resonates for you.

PS Can you let me know your thoughts on my images that go with these posts? I’ve been drawn recently to share images I’ve taken when I’ve been thinking and feeling. But then I had an idea to use artwork for my posts. Below was my second choice for this. Do you prefer snaps, or art?

If you’re finding speed elusive in 2025—if you’re tired, unclear about the path ahead, needing more rest than you remember ever needing before—this post is for you. It’s for you if you’ve been feeling guilty for going slow.
Slow to reply.
Slow to decide.
Slow to move.

Last year, I did some business training. Good marketing advice says: be consistent, post regularly, schedule reminders, keep the rhythm going. And you know what? That method works. Discipline gets results.

But I’m an artist—and I just don’t thrive in that kind of rhythm.

Because here’s the thing: as artists, what are we chasing? What exactly counts as ‘results’?

That question is at the heart of my art practice, my career, and the mentoring I do with other artists. And I keep coming back to this: I’m interested in art because it isn’t about rules. It isn’t about predictability. Art is unruliness. That’s its radical potential.

In recognising that, I’ve started to embrace my own unruly nature. That means going deep emotionally. Getting lost sometimes. Giving myself space to process what I need to—and then finding my way back to the surface again. I’m interested in cultivating quality, and that takes time. It takes reflection. It takes noticing. Witnessing life.

It means I’m slow. Honestly, I seem to have two speeds in 2025: slow and very slow.

When I work with other artists, I start by mapping the terrain. We try to uncover the real aims, the real dreams, the true destinations. But then, we also look at how to take the scenic route to get there. There’s so much depth in the slow modes of travel—in taking in the view.

Moving slowly gives your work time to evolve. It gives your audience time to grow with you. It deepens the references, the layers, the meaning.

I know it can feel counter-cultural to work slowly. But when I forgive myself for resisting the imperative to produce quickly, I find my feet, I find the ground under my work, and I build confidence and autonomy in what I do.

It’s how I love what I do. Through slowness, I find myself.

And if you’re looking to find yourself—or to draw a map to where you want to go—I’d love to help.

You’ve completed a project, met a deadline, and now, as the work meets its audience, you feel nothing. You’ve numbed out and you don’t know what you’ve made, let alone if it’s any good.

In this post, I reflect on my own recent experience of seeing a project to fruition to see if there’s anything I can share, if you find yourself feeling a similar way.

On 1st May, Sex on Stage, Performing the Body Politic was published. This is a book I have co-edited with Lynn Sally. Every Monday afternoon for over four years, we met on Zoom, creating the dream book we wanted to see realised in the world with our dream collaborators. Our contribution. It felt like a long slog, but finally, the book went to print. It took a lot, though, at every stage.

Any feelings of pride and accomplishment on my part would make total sense. This is a dream manifested. And yet I find those feelings elusive. If I can accomplish something, my subconscious seems to say, then it’s not that big a deal. Like, pride dissociation.

Here’s how I’ve been trying to fill in that emotional gap. I keep my author copies of the book to hand, to keep it in touch. If you see me out and about, I’m probably carrying it in my bag; you’re welcome to ask me to have a look. I’ve been talking about the book. Now that it’s reality it’s much easier to share the details and describe what the book is, the impact we hope it will make.

We’re now in the promotion and publicity phase, and we will be for a long time. We’ve had book launches in London and NYC with contributors coming to read, talk about their chapters and also in NYC, we had performances too. I went to both launches, and the whole of May churned up my feelings. I talked about them to trusted friends, and I also began to examine my feelings too. I’ve been journaling my feelings and trying to see what kind of fears might be hiding. I’ve set my intention to seeing what is going on here, rather than panic and bury my head in the sand because I can’t understand myself (an old MO of mine). I’ve built quietness into my schedule to give my feelings room. While I don’t completely understand my completion dysphoria, I have found some clarity around my apprehension. In the mix there’s been: fear it’ll be the last project I do, fear that as an editor my labour is invisible, fear it won’t lead to anything else.

Here’s my emergency checklist for not letting those fears dominate:

• How can I be in my body? What exercise, touch or physical experience can I have to soothe?

• How can I let my emotions come to the surface? Quiet time, journaling, having a little cry.

• How can I alchemise lostness into foundness? What does my feeling of lostness want or need?

• How can I acknowledge my accomplishments? Talking to others about the project and listening to their responses. Noting down positive insights or screenshoting positive messages.

• Gathering together all the gold fragments that emerge from this process, my self-insights and positive comments into a folder on my Google drive I can access on my phone and laptop.

• Capture the gold, shuck off the pain and doubt that arises.

When I work with artists as a mentor, all the discordant feelings are welcome with me, especially the ones that don’t make sense. When we take a look at those feelings together, we can see that they often cover over big hopes and dreams. If we keep hold of the tender feelings, and we see what‘s underneath them, we can often find such deep information and direction for future projects and career planning. I hold onto these tender visions so you can bring them into the richness of your creativity, as I hold my own angst and turn it into gold.

March and April have been a jumble for me. A mixed bag of new possibilities and existential crises. How was it for you?

In this post, I think about tending to the possibilities with care and releasing the feelings of being jostled.

The tides of possibilities washed up a few interesting ideas, approaches, and tantalising emails. Nothing concrete. Just, a sense perhaps, that nice things are on their way. And yet paired with that, I’ve also been dealing with the complicated aftermath of being hacked on Instagram. Unthinkingly, I responded to a phishing approach, and hackers took control of my main account. It took a painfully long time to reclaim that account–and all associated Meta accounts. That was two Instagram accounts and my Facebook account. I won’t give you the details. But there’s something unsettling about losing control of your name and seeing fraudulent use of your name. I felt external to myself, and disconnected from my own voice.

When I got back into my account, it felt like I’d got my car back after joy riders had stolen it, with full ashtrays, a strong smell of weed, mud caking the footwell mats. The Instagram equivalent: my date of birth changed, my friends blocked, and I saw the thousands of messages the hackers sent. It’s been mortifying. I feel so embarrassed.

Why am I detailing all this? The time away from my Meta accounts has been an enforced digital detox, a pause for silence, and I realised I want some things to change. Mindless social media scrolling had become habitual for me and I haven’t been showing up in good faith. While I am holding the potential seeds of new possibilities and projects, returning to the jostle of Instagram has felt jarring.

When I open up the apps, the monetisation of Meta platforms means that they feel like virtual shopping centres rather than previously, a jolly hubbub of a town square–news from people I know. I realised, I don’t want to be there all the time. I don’t want to open up the social media apps in bad faith.

Having said that, the key social media platforms are an easy way for me to reach out to people in my network. I did feel at a loss without that connection when I was locked out. And in a weird twist of fate, one of the messages the hackers sent out precipitated someone I hadn’t messaged before to look me up and reach out, and fortunately, we connected after the hacker’s occupation. And so, I am grateful that Meta has enabled me to find, interact, and meet up with new colleagues and friends. I know I don’t want to leave the platforms. But I do want to reframe them.

And so, I downloaded the minimalist phone app, which removes the icons from your phone screen, leaving you with a list of the app names. It feels more like admin than confectionery to open apps. Also, you set a time for how long you’ll be in key time-sucking apps before you open them. Using the app has shifted how I feel already, I feel more intentional in my phone use.

I also recognised that on both Instagram and Facebook I feel inhibited in what I say. My voice is shaped by the apps, and the distribution of my voice by the mercurial algorithmic forces. Sometimes I say exactly what I want to say, in the way I want to say it, and nobody sees it. Mainly, though, my desire to communicate in more meditative and reflective ways doesn’t work on Meta. I write here, of course. But I see this space as my service to artists, in which I share my career reframes in the hope that what I’m thinking about is useful to others.

I’ve had to ask myself some hard questions in order to get to the reframes. In particular, I’ve been asking myself if I show up to write, to share myself, and my work online in good faith. And because I’ve been dealing with some murky feelings, some shame, and anxiety about myself brought on by some projects reaching fruition, as well as the hacking incident, I’ve not been able to show up for myself in good faith.

And so I offer my apologies for the hiatus in writing here, showing up for Joy Development. I love writing this Substack, and thinking again about how we can find agency as artists in how we do our professional development tasks. But I’ve been without my voice, and I didn’t want to write when I was in that space of silence.

Now as I emerge out of the silence, I realise that I have stories of my own artwork and writing projects I want to share, without the lens of Joy Development. An artist’s newsletter. A studio diary. Reflections on what I’ve made, what I’m working on, what I’m selling direct from the studio, and where you can see my work. If you want to join me with that, it’s here Glamour in Practice.

My wish for you is that you have your voice, and you have somewhere or two you are happy speak, and you find your groove in communicating in good faith. And if this is something you’d like help with, as ever, let me know. I can help.

After a period of quiet introspection and a pause in creative productivity, you notice the green shoots poking out of the ground, and you realise that the expansion of spring is on its way. And so too for us artists: the creative spark is poking through in our imaginations, and in our desires to create.

I write Joy Development from my observations from my practice and noticing the experiences of my peers and mentees—the communities around me of other creative folk. I feel this winter has necessitated a particular kind of quiet healing and renewal, as though we have each needed to strengthen our resolve in solitude. Now though, I think, it is time to notice that spring is on its way: a new season to manifest our ideas. And to get out of the soil of our ruminations.

It feels as though winter has been long—a winter of the weather, but a winter of bleakness in our shared world. I know I’ve really had to metabolise and process the changing context around us, and that means recognising that I feel jangled by fast news, headlines, and sound bites. I need long-form podcasts, slow news, and considered analysis. I need time to digest, and I need my news to come from a grounded place of digestion and understanding. This means putting together what I listen to and I welcome slow, considered news storytelling recommendations.

As artists, we are sensitive beings, sensitive to the emotional resonances around us—and indeed this is our gift. I encourage us to be considered consumers of the world around us, making intentional and mindful decisions about what we absorb. We should also remember to draw on cultural experiences to help us process the destabilising events. So this is your reminder to go see exhibitions, theatre, and concerts. Put yourself inside experiences that enable you to feel rather than numb out. And remember too, the importance of your practices, which may change seasonally, but enable you to feel, think and reflect without being swamped and numbed. For example, bodily practices of movement and rest, pleasure and nurture.

Let spring re-ignite us all, in our processes, practices, in our thoughts, and in our dreams.

In my work with artists, I centre dreams as grand schemes to be taken seriously and strategised into reality. I also emphasise how we tend to ourselves, so we can continue our progress resisting burnout. If you need support to reframe what you are working on, or how you work, and you’re ready to work with a mentor, send me a message, get in touch.

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There’s a temptation to believe Spotify Unwrapped, that the time to reflect on a year is in November. Wrap it up before it’s ended. And there’s another strong pull to see the time for reflection is as some time near that cusp moment between the 31st December and the 1st January. I disagree though, because I know my own processes of internal investigation do not follow calendar dates.

In this post, I contemplate what 2024 taught me and I think about the possibilities of a new year opening up before us. I will consider my own slow arrival into 2025, and share my feelings on hibernation, renewal, and resolve as an invitation for you notice your own processes and emerging sense of what you want in 2025: what you want to welcome in.

I’ve had a month of deep rest, brought on by a virus, a low key virus with minimal symptoms, but so much fatigue. I still feel as though I’m running on reduced energy reserves, but I wonder, is this always the way? Are the viruses of winter a part of the seasonal cycle, inviting us into quietness and hibernation?

I actually wrote a Substack post draft in December on rest and reflection, but I was so far into my own silence it didn’t feel true for me to broadcast.

I made some experiments in the studio, but that was not my creative focus. My focus was on Russell Brand. In Autumn, I felt a sense of an essay I wanted to write on Brand. I’ve been a follower of Brand for years, but since the allegations of sexual abuse and rape that were brought to light through the Dispatches documentary, In Plain Sight, last year I felt as though there was something I could contribute to the wider discussion on him, by examining my own responses to him over the years. I also feel as though the temptation to ‘cancel’ what we feel a strong aversion to means that we miss out on developing deeper insight into the complicatedness of life. Afterall, like it or not, Brand has made significant cultural contributions, not least, bringing spiritual practices to wider attention. So, I gathered my thoughts together and pitched to Novara Media, who commissioned me to write a ‘long read’. My intention was to bring clear sight to emotive themes and to ask myself searching questions on what I did not see previously in his behaviour. It took me a week to write the first draft, a couple of days to evolve the second draft, and another day or so to polish up and sign off the piece. In short, it was the focus of December for me.

The process of writing involved self examination on my part. In the quietness, I journeyed inwards and unearthed my own spiritual and sexual experiences and looked at them in relation to Brand’s output. Not all of my self enquiry lived in the piece, but for a while there, I thought about our parallels and differences. The way that Brand has used his energy, positively as well as to domniate others. I thought about the instances in which I felt dominated. In order for me to generate writing or artwork, I travel the lengths of my interirority, I test out my experiences against wider ideas, so that I can bring forth a synthesis that rings true for me. But that leg work isn’t necessary for a reader or viewer. I do the work, then edit. Suffice to say, writing the Brand essay set the agenda for my December.

The finished essay was published on Monday 13th January, this week, you can read it here if you are interested. In preparation for publication, I felt really foggy about what I had written. I had a sense it was quite pedestrian, rather basic. I felt a little fragmented, knowing that something I had written was going to be published on a national news platform. As I wrote and edited I felt both a sense of commitment and intrigue around doing something new, turning my writing into journalistic-style prose, but there were at the margins feelings of doubt. Once the writing was finished, I felt distanced from it, as though someone else had written it. The date of publication was delayed. I felt emotionally suspended.

And then I received the email: the essay had been published on the website, and shared on social media. I shared the link to a handful of friends. I felt nothing. I felt disassociated from what I’d done. A sense of endings descended on me. I played on rotation three albums in which death is faced down: Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, David Bowie’s Black Star, and Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around. I felt my darkest feelings, those of doubt, disconnection, and creative isolation. Tears rolled down my face. It was also a full moon that day and I felt as though my familiar demons of irrelevance and worthlessness were exposed anew.

Tuesday came, and my appetite for Bowie, Cash, and Cohen continued. But seeds of new thoughts revealed themselves to me. I was grieving the end of the self in me that is afraid to write, afraid to pitch, afraid of a national readership. But on Tuesday, it was no longer possible to say that it was beyond me to pitch, write, and publish in a news outlet something with nuance, self-examination, and insight on a controversial topic because I had done it. I was grieving the death of certain kinds of fears I’ve had of being seen.

As I wrestled with these complicated feelings, I read comments by strangers on Instagram and Facebook. I felt shame for trying to write something so ambitious. I felt ridiculous for trying to make sense of an impossibly messy subject.

By Wednesday though, I began to feel a sense of calm. This when 2025 began for me. I could feel the loose ends of 2024 and a sense of the journey I’d travelled through the year. It was a year defined, for me, by the phrase ‘self-determination’. Over the year I really had to learn what it means to set your own agenda and to follow through. Putting my thoughts out into the world via the Brand article was the synthesis of that journey. Wednesday too, I began to recieve positive comments from friends and those I admire on the piece. I had a feeling of resolve. I had the feeling in my body of the capacity to articulate myself on a larger scale. I searched Spotify for 80s dance songs (we were watching the tv show Rivals in the evenings) and I danced a little. I shook off my doubt.

Thursday though, brought news of the passing of David Lynch. If ever we needed a reminder, to live life in the present, it’s hearing that news of Lynch’s passing. Like many artists, I feel such a deep connection to Lynch. As I meditate the same way he does, that connection feels a little deeper.

I’m sharing my process observations with you, as an offering. Maybe they’ll help you attune yourself to the new year. Making: art, writing, life, involves witnessing and bringing together the pieces, fragments, observations, and feelings of our experiences. Creative joy is found in our own weaving together of the fragments, because these fragments, the joy, the sorrow, the doubt, and the fear, they are what we have to work with.

When we decide to stretch ourselves, in terms of what we produce, how we show up, and the new audiences we share ourselves with, it will feel daunting, overwhelming, and exposing. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.

And know that when you do push yourself beyond your comfort zone I’m cheering you on. Indeed, if you want me to be your cheerleader through your creative expansion, I’d love to help. Get in touch.

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I write these reflections at the end of the month on what I’ve been up to in the studio as a way of sharing how I show up for my creativity. I find it’s when I take a breath and take stock, I can see how I’ve evolved and what I’ve accomplished. It’s in that spirit I share these notes.

I feel as though the theme of November was discussion—asking questions of my work, being in conversation with others, and then using writing to stage my thoughts.

The month was defined by the open studios event at both Yorkshire Artspace buildings (Exchange Place and Persistence Works). Thousands of visitors came by and studio holders opened up their studios to the public. I put up new theatre photos I’ve recently edited, resolved, and printed. Seeing them together on the wall has enabled me to see how the initial visual rules I gave myself to create the work, I don’t need to slavishly follow. I’m now at a point where I find interesting stories to tell in each theatre and I can be a little more intuitive about how I make my compositions. Also, maybe some of them don’t have the same title, they might evolve into different bodies. Seeing them all together though, gave me a renewed sense of ambition for that work—there’s more I want to say and do with that visual vocabulary.

The open studios though, are an introvert’s nightmare—many interesting conversations but the quantity makes it exhausting.

I felt a bit like I couldn’t see the wood for the trees with an idea of mine that I need to polish up into a proposal for a commission, so I invited a friend into my studio to chat with me and ask me pointed questions to freshen up my thinking. That really helped me to reconnect with what matters most about that idea.

I also had this strange new feeling. I developed a strong sense of having something important I wanted to write in an essay, so I pitched and was commissioned to write. It took me a week to pull down my original insights—it was hard, writing is hard—what you want to say is always out of reach, then you just have to extend yourself a little bit and grasp those hard-to-reach thoughts. In some senses, I can feel a little bit less like a real artist because I do have the desire to write—a limiting belief that I’m cheating on my art practice if I create anything else. But I allowed myself the grace, to do something even when I don’t understand the impulse: to be an artist writing a critical essay that is ostensibly beyond my research interests, or the research interests I’m known for. It might be better say that this is potentially an evolving direction and a broading out of my interests. It felt good. I feel as though I do want to weave writing essays into what I do, like, I think I have a few essays a year in me. What I’ve written hasn’t been edited or published yet so it’s a bit too soon to say more, but I’ve completed and turned in draft one.

In my mentoring, I’m also increasingly supporting artists to write critically and creatively and to think about how they can deepen their research by developing a writing practice. If you want support in expanding the ways you work and generating your own projects autonomously, I can help you with that, get in touch and we can see if I can support you.

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You’re in the studio, and you listen to the news, you can’t imagine things get worse, but then they do.

As artists and creatives how do we make sense of the world around us? The hostile context in which it feels like we have little power to change anything or make an impact?

I had notes I was going to type up into a post a couple of weeks ago. But the US elections blindsided me, and I felt disconnected from what I had written. I couldn’t share thoughts on cultivating joy in good faith at that moment, so I didn’t. I had to feel the feelings, in the hope they’d pass. A tall order, because some of my gloomy thoughts weren’t about the election, but the wider context of the election: the genocide in Gaza and the climate. And the recognition that clear-sighted, truthful analysis feels so rare. 

It’s difficult not to feel disempowered and that to make art is a futile gesture right now. 

Well, don’t make art. Don’t make art on the days when the feelings of despair need their space. Or rather, take that pressure off, strike creativity off the to-do list for now. 

I was in London when Trump was declared the next US President. I decided it was important to go and see an exhibition of new portraits by Kehinde Wiley. Wiley was commissioned to paint Barrack Obama, which I saw, alongside Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama, in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, when I was visiting for a conference a few years ago. It’s moving to see these portraits, as visually and symbolically they meaningfully intervene in the presidential portrait tradition. Rather than upholding convention, both paintings convey dignity and contemporary complex personhood situating both Obamas in their own unique context. More than that, for the first time, the commissions went to Black contemporary artists, painting the first Black former President and First Lady. 

Sometimes art is political by existing. 

Last week, I had a rare free Friday night and so I went along to 5 Rhythms dance class near me. A 5 Rhythms class follows a wave, moving through: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. There are no instructions on how to dance, by the teacher might provide prompts as well as a playlist to get you into these different rhythms. 

During ‘chaos’, the most energetic of the five rhythms, a long remix of Candi Staton’s ‘You Got The Love’ was played. I connected with the song viscerally as I heard the lines “Now it feels like life is just too much”. Soon after, Sarah, the teacher said to us all “you’ve all got into your heads, whatever you’re feeling, put it into the dance”. This was such a smart and generous intervention. I put it into the dance and a few tears came. 

There is a temptation to think we can make sense of this moment in our heads. We can’t. Sense comes by feeling and releasing. And releasing is a bodily process. 

Put it into the dance, and let it go. Get it out of your head.

Here’s what I learned, a new cheat sheet for finding joy in dark times:

• Go see art. Art does something beyond language, it takes you somewhere where you can feel and think and this is it’s restorative potential. 

• Go for a walk. Walk it out, move your body. 

• Dance it out, put on music that you want to hear and move and let go. If all else fails, I recommend ‘You Got The Love’. 

Things feel different once you’ve given time and space to feelings of despair, allowing them rather than repressing them. Letting go of them is a bodily process. Finding release and then finding the next step doesn’t come from the mind, but from the body. So there’s no reframe for dark times I can give you in words. It has to be an embodied felt experience—and that’s how joy can return. On the other side of moving–a breath in and a breath out. 

We’re nearing the end of another year of turbulence and change. If you’d like support in reviewing this year, making sense of what you’ve made and achieved, working with a mentor can be so valuable in developing clarity and self-insight. And also, beginning a new year setting professional intentions and dreaming how you’d like to evolve can help you get going on your path with clarity. 

I’d like to make you a seasonal offer: 2x hr sessions with me which would normally cost £160, I’m offering for £140, that’s a £20 discount for an hour with me before the end of year, and another at the start of 2025. If that feels inviting to you, message me.

At the end of September, I had a sense of the forward direction of travel in terms of the Graves Commission I’m working on, drawings I’m going to create in relation to their collection. And just as I was about to begin… I didn’t.

I didn’t know it, but I needed to pause and review my work. I’ve found myself guided by unconscious impulses and intuitions and research encounters so that now, at the end of October I feel enriched and inspired. But I didn’t plan it that way. In fact, I abandoned the to-do list and forward momentum in favour of feeling the backward drag. The ebb tide.

I could feel the pull of drawings I’d been unable to resolve, and then abandoned in the summer. A drawing series I’m making from dancers I’d photographed at Sexplicit, a worker-run pop-up strip club event. It’s a departure for me to make drawings from photographs taken now of other people. I’ve been wanting to find ways to make this series. I experimented with creating two drawings of each dancer: mirror images. I also experimented with patterning the figures. I’m borrowing a book on Gustav Klimt, which is on my desk. Looking at his paintings inspired the shapes I’m using to decorate the images. Only this month I saw, he decorated the negative space around the figures. That’s what I began to do. I used black paper and gold pen and decorated the negative space. Not every drawing is resolved, but I’m learning how to make this work, how to render these figures in a way that honours them.

Near the start of the month, I went to see Now You See As, Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain. In the exhibition, a caption described how the artist, Mary Black, in 1764 painted Messenger Monsey and expected to be paid £25 for the work. This was half the amount Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painter of the day charged. However Monsey thought her expectation to be paid was improper, and he described her as a slut in a letter to his cousin. 

The slut in the studio. The slut in the gallery. The slut in the theatre. The slut in the stripclub.

I remembered a photograph I took at Windmill International, a gentlemen’s club that operated in the famous (Mrs Henderson Presents) Windmill Theatre. I made the photograph in 2011. Installed on the stage walls in the club were versions of Klimt paintings. The Klimt in the club.

I felt the urge to revisit all my theatre photos. Reviewing them, I saw many alternate images I hadn’t worked on before that add to the visual narrative of the series. I saw something now I hadn’t been able to see before. I spent a day in the community editing suite at the Site Gallery using Photoshop to edit and tidy them all up. On a trip through Lancashire, I organised photographing another theatre and another strip club. And then I took over a dozen images to Untitled Print, for printing, editing, but more importantly, another eye on the work. 

I listened to podcasts on Gustav Klimt as I worked on the drawings. I’ve been thinking about decoration. The subversive potential of decoration. As I look back over October in the studio, I see connections and preoccupations that drive my work anew.

It’s not that I can see all the connections, nor can I make sense of everything I’ve been thinking about this month. But a few phrases linger in my mind to make sense of: ‘the muse and the slut’, ‘decoration and defiance’, ‘become hypervisible in the areas we’ve been shamed’.

Ascending A Staircase, Funny Girls, Blackpool, 1939, 2024

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You’ve made new artwork taking a new direction. And then you do an artist’s talk or someone visits your studio and find yourself talking about the work. On reflection, though, you are unsure if what you said was relevant and you wonder if what you said might have been off-topic or personal. I find this happens to me when I’ve made new work and I’m not sure what it is. 

Before the work has landed and the insight has come, we can find ourselves speaking around the work in ways that might feel exposing and don’t guide the listener deeper into the work. It’s important to protect the tender time of not-knowing when you are still making the work. However, at some point, we must share new work. And so, I write this to help you navigate how you might talk about your work, purposefully, truthfully, and incisively, without pinning it down, before you sense what it is.

I think about how every body of work we make is supported by a scaffold that an audience does not see. Here I envisage a theatre stage with scenery—from the front, there is a visual tableaux that makes sense, and at the back, the view is entirely different. In our art practice, the unseen scaffold is composed of everything that went into the process of making the work: material experimentation and testing, early versions, research, influences, art seen, books read, and advice received. All the the leg work. All the unconscious work that underpins creative practice. The scaffold is for us to make the work, it is not part of the work, and so it is not for public viewing. However, sometimes curators, collectors, commissioners, or writers want to know on a deeper level what drives the work: they want a peek at the scaffold. But to view the whole scaffold would not be interesting–there’s too much on there.

I see the scaffold as informing what we put on the public stage. The scaffold enables us to make the work, write our artist statement, and communicate the work. The scaffold though, is whatever we need it to be, and there’s no reason for us to edit it or make it look good for anyone else. We don’t need that extra pressure.

Here’s my suggestion. To enable you to confidently share a focussed view of some of the scaffold material—jot down on a large sheet of paper, mind-map style, all of the things you are aware of that informed the work. For example, all the thoughts, impulses, experiments and research. You might need to do this over a period of time. It’s probably best to do this in your workspace where you can see some of the physical scaffold. Some of the more internal or emotional scaffold might come into your consciousness after a day or two. Once you can see a project’s scaffold, use a highlighter pen to identify what feels comfortable, accurate, and useful for you to share. You could even make a new sheet and see how it looks together. There’s no reason at this stage for there to be a linear narrative across this material. In fact, it can be quite exciting for a listener to hear you begin to make sense of your scaffold material for the first time. The task though, is to stay with what you’ve mapped—the material you feel comfortable discussing. You don’t need to be guided by anything more than your intuition or hunches. But this can give you some sense of clarity before you’ve arrived at your deeper sense-making insights. And it can help you to feel empowered and intentional rather than over-sharing and exposed. 

It might be useful to keep your two mindmaps in the studio while you work—the full scaffold inventory map and the public-facing edit. The latter might serve as a starting point for your artist statement on the work.

I use the analogy of the scaffold a lot in my mentoring—I think it’s a useful image that can illuminate the parts of the process that might be unconscious or skipped over. But examining our scaffolds can unlock more creative potential and new directions. I hope my thoughts on the scaffold help you in your making process.

You’ve made your application, you’ve sent off a proposal, you’ve made an approach. And you didn’t get a no. But nor did you get a yes. Somewhere between those two lies the maybes. 

You may have received a maybe because you missed out on a residency or grant, but the panel liked you and wanted to get in touch. Or, you get a yes for a proposal or project but then the organisation has a funding shortfall, change of staff, building renovation—something that gets in the way of the moving forward. In this post, I write about the ‘maybes’—the positive but unquantifiable responses we receive.

This post is by request and I’m very grateful for the provocation because otherwise, I don’t think I’d have thought to write this. That’s not because I don’t receive maybes, but rather the opposite—I’ve had so many—and each confuses me so much, I think once I’ve gone through a period of being preoccupied by a maybe, I hide them from myself. And in that hiding, I think I also deposit a bit a shame too for good measure. So, it is high time shine light on the maybes, not least for myself, to see what reframing might be possible.

Whereas rejection or acceptance, yes or no have clarity, the maybe has none. Maybes are false starts, unquantifiable favours, assets without details, compliments without commitment. While it might feel good to not get a no, the slipperiness of a maybe is disempowering. What do you do with a maybe? Without an action plan, budget or contract, what have you got?

See if you can find out what exactly is being offered or implied: is it a networking opportunity or a chance for deeper feedback or a recommendation to apply for something else on the horizon, or an introduction to someone else? What further intel can you gather? Would a phone call help you hear what’s being offered, off the record? If you’re not able to get more detail from the organisation/person, do you know anyone connected who could give you an overview? 

From my own experiences though, maybes have felt stagnant, and I’ve found it difficult to generate momentum from them. I think the value of the maybe could emerge, possibly years later. So see if you can turn the maybe into a relationship-building exercise. Is the maybe to be seen as an introduction?

It maybe that you don’t get clear on the maybe and so at the minimum, take the compliment implied by it, and move on. Let it go. If there is something there, it will hopefully come back, clearer. I can tell you from experience, the maybe doesn’t get clearer from fixating on it. So let it go. 

I think maybes, more so than acceptance or rejection, can destabilise or derail. I’ve found maybes have knocked my sense of direction and confidence—and it’s in those moments I’ve worked with a mentor to find the path again. I think the distracting quality of the maybe the effort to connect to external validation, and every time I’ve ever done that, I’ve felt so emotionally unsteady. With a mentor, you can unpack stagnancy in your practice and reconnect with what energises you and get going again. If you feel a bit maybe-ed out and lost, we can do that work together, I love getting creatives back on their path. You can book in for a discovery call to see if I can help.

Let me know if you’ve had better maybe experiences than I, or if you have other themes you’d like me to address.

Over September, I have contemplated the artwork I looked at in July, in the Sheffield Museums stores, and in the Graves Gallery. I have gathered them together, printed out, and pinned them on my studio wall.

I was fortunate enough to be awarded a ‘Looking Forward, New Dialogues’ Sheffield Museums commission, to produce work to be shown at the Graves next year. (My own ‘yes’ email, my own acceptance that took a while to land–I write by reflecting directly on my own experiences!)

Ordering the images on the wall by responding to the position of the shoulders, head, and eyes, I’ve created some image clusters. There are two lines of sitters, that I might merge into one continuous line through my drawing of them. By making the eye position a key compositional point, something of the gaze becomes enhanced or revealed. You can see the eyes look out–at something? The artist? The middle distance? Or disconnected from the outside and lost in thought? I think that I will render each artwork into a drawing of the figure isolated from the background, and sitting in a row, audience style. 

Other artworks detail the full figure performing or involved in action, and I’m still thinking about how I handle those.  

By clustering these figures together to put them in relation to one another, and disavow context or time, I wonder what happens? All of these figures have in common that they are the subject of an artwork. In terms of creating titles, there are a few phrases I’m sitting with: ‘the subject of art history’, ‘the muses are watching’/’the muses are watching you’, and ‘the muses’. I don’t know how these phrases will evolve yet.

September in the studio has been about gathering, reflecting, and seeing. Sitting with not-knowing. It’s delicate, the time of not-knowing, because it can invite in doubt. But not-knowing can also invite in inspiration, and fresh thoughts and research. For this new body of work, I’ve wanted to suspend what I know and think, I’ve resisted bringing in what I already think–which could be a convenient starting point. Instead, I’ve favoured not knowing, to see what washes up, to see what these new figures on my wall want to teach me. And next, in October, I’ll begin to make, and materialise, and I’m curious to see what that process brings.

Thanks for reading along. I often think that being an artist and being in a studio is such a rich experience. I enjoy slowing down and writing about these modest observations, feelings, and areas of growth that are all too easy to overlook.

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