I’m trying to write an artists statement for funding applications today. Asking, what has the practice become, or what is it in the process of becoming? For the first time it feels coherent, cohesive, it feels like it has a core and a focus and a direction. It feels wonderful. I am, at a late age, taking flight. My creative work has evolved slowly over years but really found form through the PhD process. I have always been concerned with class and mobility, especially images of escape that are foiled by circumstance – I suppose having watched my dad escape to America as a kid while we remained rooted in Gateshead was formative. The Rocketship is about kids having their dreams quashed by economic reality. Turn of the Screw is a short comedy about corporate capture of the individual. At a fragmentary and granular level, my film, writing, and emerging visual work is about rootedness and restraint – whether that restraint is extrinsic, or intrinsic, whether it comes from class, age, gender, disability, or the structures that grind on those characteristics like a millstone.
But on a broader level, over the past almost four years my practice has found itself rooted in a far deeper and richer seam. It has a resonant bass note, now, that underscores it, that ties its discordance together with a satisfying vibration coming up through my feet. What I took into the doctoral process was a highly conflicted identity as a writer and filmmaker, working in conventional genre modes, trying to make everything fit into neat boxes for funders and publishers – but failing miserably. It was painful, and often I felt like I was split in half, hiding various facets of my creative self from various factions of my creative output – clients, other artists, family, even aspects of my-self – who might be disapproving. I know now, after centring the thesis on my ADHD experience, that the reasons for my career frictions weren’t down to a lack of ability, of knowledge, or especially of tenacity – that so-valued attribute of all good capitalist meritocrats and the specialism of those who have learned to dig heels in deep to compete – but a difference in cognition. My brain doesn’t have the working memory to easily hold large, multifaceted projects, you see. At least not without great pain and discomfort. The boredom that comes with attenuating work toward neatness and legibility, rather than messy play, means that my novelty seeking ADHD brain finds it difficult to hold focus on the pernickety requirements of formalist work intended to make it through narrow institutional gates. Socially speaking, my flighty consciousness, with its insane vacillation between ephemeral interests and monotropic foci, means that I find cliques impossible to stabilise myself into, or perhaps it’s the other way around, and it is me that is impossible…
But what emerged from the PhD was a practice that was refocussed on play, messiness, conscious disobedience, and rejecting the idea of sanitisation and formalisation, and fitting through gates. I am no longer a mere filmmaker or a writer, I am a mess-maker, an intentional creative rogue, a person who plays with whatever media he can lay his hands like pots of finger-paint, to explore his themes by smearing them over the walls. A visual arts practice, and a confident identity as an artist, is what emerged and spread its gloriously malformed and bricolaged wings from its PhD pupation.
Where the practice has really discovered its theoretical and thematic resonance, though, is in the exploration of the construction and maintenance of subjective identity. Beyond the bags of chemicals that we are, how do our experiences form our assemblages? This question is as old as the Greeks. But as an artist, I’m interested in how work captures the residues of these formations and erosions, much as rocks capture the essences of the Earth during various epochs since its condensation from star matter. All creative work is auto to varying extents. Who we are extends into what we make, whether that’s through the cybernetic appendage of a paintbrush, a pen, or a hammer. My PhD thesis explored the idea of trying to interrogate the voices that emerge like ghostly imprints in the rocks cracked open through artistic exploration ( are they fossils? No, because often they are still very much alive) in my work, and it asked questions about how neurodiversity complicates subjective construction and expression, and more – how those complications might be leveraged to challenge exclusive structures of cultural production designed with neoliberal intent.
My new project, working titled Connection, will be an exploration of ways in which our past, present, and anticipated future relationships with the world shape our selves. Initiated through a process of writing letters to past and future usses, and to lovers, objects, friends, pets, relatives – whatever and whoever has tied our tumultuous identity creation to whatever and whoever constitutes our reality – the work will eventually seep from the page, evolving into its own organic being, make its way into an exhibition space, and make meaning with whoever it encounters as an audience. For my own part, for the first time ever my assemblage feels somewhat – if perhaps temporarily – stable, it’s humming with the energy of confidence, and I’m incredibly excited to explore the ways in which connection forges us all, through the sensory inputs of this new developing work.