Interface volume 3 issue 2: Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement | Interface: a journal for and about social movements

Interface volume 3 issue 2: Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement | Interface: a journal for and about social movements.

This tickles all my little grey cells  – am as excited to read this as a child at Christmas with pressies still to unwrap.

Manna for the mind

Ill-defined

So the notion of ‘holiday’ or ‘break’ … how does that pan out for you?

After the Christmas madness, with the house empty, a week to fill with domestic creative and re-decorating demand… where does the idea of ‘break’ or ‘rest’ fit in to this void.

Void.

There we have it. Void.

I plan and prepare for these periods of still shapeless time, with painting, building, making, cleaning, clearing, but at the point I push through the surface tension membrane of real time into void space, time itself alters form entirely. In the way that dust motes float suspended in hot still summer fug or sound muffles under water, the rotation of the world slows and I watch from inside my void as life shifts forward inexorably without me.

Without the 24 hour demand of personal need, social necessity, financial anxiety, professional expectation – the identity created by the demand of external expectations – I become formless, a mote drifting aimlessly upon the brownian movement of air in a confined space.

This still space allows for the creation of a new form though I think. A new subject, a new self-created, self-demanded, self-identified accretion of matter, need, like, choice, wish, thought. So who am I when I am not the physical emanation of the needs and demands of everybody else? what should I do when I am not required to put the wants of others as a priority?

The silence allows  inspiration to flow without hurdles or interruptions towards the possibility of what I am and whether I can keep hold of this fledgling concept with the return of noise.

Into the silence I pour ideas, I listen to Mira Schor lecturing on Non Conformist Criticality in Contemporary Art, disussing what Feminist Art really looks like and Carol Schneeman reviewing the Iconography of her work and  the idiocy of a painting of a nude male in a recumbent pose being classified as porn and therefore unfit to be exhibited in an Art Gallery.

So I listen while I re-decorate the bedroom of my greatest achievement and allow possibilities to reshape the form I inhabit into the beginnings of a new Subject. My own subject, created for and by me, alone.

This new subject will explore the multiple ‘Maligned Territory’/s (with my regards to Kiki Smith) inhabited by the intellectual/professional/feminist/humanist/socialist/essentially unconvinced/politically enraged and financially challenged contemporary conceptual Artist/parent that I am.

An expedition no less, an adventure I hope and a new path.

Happy New Year.