14. Creativity and Fight / Flight/ Freeze

I was so delighted to receive the DYCP funding. As is often the way with arts funding, I had other work scheduled for the planned start date I had submitted in the grant when I found out I’d been successful. As a freelancer going for a competitive grant it wasn’t possible to turn down other work on the 10% chance that I would be successful. Rescheduling my project to start at the original time, but less intensely, was a bit frustrating. I just wanted to launch and immerse myself in the possibilities.

And then things started to unravel. I developed hip pain, and something I thought was probably a training injury turned out to be a fractured pelvis. The pain increased over a number of days, and the recovery largely involved not moving very much at all for 5 months, then lots of physio. So that meant cancelling or not taking on other work and rethinking what I might do as part of my DYCP project. And then a close member of my family who lives in Europe needed significant support, and I spent much of 2022 moving slowly and painfully between countries, worried for a loved ones safety and wellbeing.

I had previously spent all of 2015–2018 unwell, juggling two chronic health conditions. Unable to make work, or live, in the way I wanted. This new set of challenges, coming so soon after the pandemic, which had stopped work and significantly increased my caring responsibilities felt like a kick in the teeth. I found it difficult to get any momentum on the project, or to let ideas unfold and be explored. I wondered if I’d picked the wrong thing to work on, that maybe it didn’t interest me anymore, that maybe this work was no longer for me. I was frustrated and despondent and frequently thought about returning the grant and just stopping. I extended the end date twice as my recovery went more slowly than planned. The project felt like it limped along, not the sparkling energy I had when dreaming the project into being.

Then in the first week of December 2022 I went on a 4 day Burnout retreat on the Sharpham Estate in Devon (not funded by my DYCP) A mixture of meditation, talks, walks, mindful movement and rest. On the third day, after a gentle walk I had a strange sensation, I felt full, as if I’d eaten a heavy meal and my limbs felt heavy. I was worried I’d come down with a cold, until it slowly dawned on me. I was relaxed and pain free. That was this unfamiliar sensation. 

Later that afternoon, in the pale winter sun, sitting on a terrace with my notebook I started drawing, first a low stone wall with grass and lichen creeping through the mortar. Then a water bottle wrapped in a scarf. Then I started writing in response to silvery cobweb strands in the grass. I just started making, nothing forced or scheduled. Just unfurling. Not easy, I’d re-work parts of the drawings, tinker with the poem – pruning, shaping. 

This experience reminded me of the conditions of creativity. Having the grant, scheduling the time, having a practice and process was all important. I discovered lots, developed my thinking and have lots of new ideas to take forward and test. But pain and stress were a big barrier. I’m privileged, my family had the resources to help me take some time out after a difficult few years. I developed the awareness of how stress was impacting me, and learned some tools to support relaxation. It all came a bit late in the day for the DYCP which I was completing. And then I remind myself, the DYCP is about my practice. My work as an artist, which I hope will continue to grow, whether or not I choose to make it my profession in the future.

I suppose this blog is about not being so hard on myself, I have perfectionist tendencies which can make me unhelpfully critical of myself. I didn’t get to create a movement piece on the edge of a river or the red sandstone outcrops that I’d imagined would be part of the residency. But the limitations did bring a slower way of working that is maybe more relevant to the research themes of the project. I had to put into practice the permaculture principle of making the smallest possible interventions to create change. The experience has also made me think more deeply about what accessibility in my work is like, when the barrier is a social one, like caring responsibilities, and the complete exhaustion that often comes with that. As I develop the next phase of the project I think it will be richer and more available to a wider range of people. I also think that I will design the work in a more sustainable way for me, resisting the ‘make it fast, make it big’ approaches that have dominated lots of my work to date.