With
thanks to Neil
I
attended a really up-lifting and enjoyable International Women's Day
event today organised by a friend
of mine, involving women who make or create from all over
Aberdeenshire. My friend was saying
that approaching life (and creativity) with an open heart and no fear
was important and I completely
agree with her. Certainly every time I set out to make a new
photograph, it is a leap of faith
and exposes something of myself. Art is about what we feel. How we
feel. Why we feel. It's an
attempt to stop the world for a time and say “look – this means
something to me and might mean something
to you.” We are all in this together.
An
open heart and no fear is also appropriate with regard to this piece
because I was (until recently) unsure about whether to publish it or
not. Not really out of fear, although there is an element of that,
but more because I am worried that people may misunderstand my
motives. I don't want to over-share and I don't want to elicit
sympathy but there are reasons I feel it necessary to talk about
things which have happened to me in my life. Firstly, this should (I
hope) lead on to the next post I am writing which deals with my take
on the art I make and secondly, there have been some recent
experiences I've had which have brought things I try to keep
submerged bubbling to the surface. Some of these are personal issues
which I won't go into but I have also been very affected by the
recent tragic death of Frances Andrade - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/10/frances-andrade-killed-herself-lying.
I
believe that there is a profound connection between my childhood and
my creativity. There was an
excellent programme on Radio 4 a couple of years ago presented by
Grayson Perry about creativity.
He set out to explore and then explode myths surrounding creativity
such as “creative people
are a little bit mad.” I enjoyed the programme very much,
especially his discussion with a psychologist
who had written an article on possible connections between childhood
trauma and creativity
entitled 'Scars on the Bone.'
Anyone
who has experienced something bad in their lives will know that it's
possible to stick memories/experiences
into a box and tuck that box into a dark corner of the mind where it
can lie undisturbed
for some time. It never disappears, however, and it only takes a
phrase, a word, an image
or an event to shove that box back into the light and re-open it. The
experience of Frances Andrade
(who took her own life after being made to re-live the sexual abuse
which she suffered as a child
and young teenager in a court case after being advised by police not
to seek therapy or help) made
me think about the fact that children who are the victims of
something, more often than not, believe
it to be somehow their own fault. That they were, in some way,
responsible. And I have also
been thinking that the shame we adults who have been child victims
carry with us is actually a continuation
of the abuse. It's very easy not to talk about difficult things but
this perpetuates our notion
that, as children, we did something wrong.
The
first 18 years of my life were fairly hard. From being an unwanted
accidental conception, my mother's
suicide attempts and mental illnesses and consequent stays in
psychiatric hospitals, sexual abuse
from the age of 5 at the hands of my mother's ex-husband, domestic
abuse of my mother by a boyfriend
to homelessness whilst I was studying for my A levels. My way of
coping was to escape mentally.
A solitary only child by nature, I withdrew into books and into
worlds of my own making.
My imagination saved me I think. I really believe that this way of
escaping paved the way for
my need to find a creative way to express myself. To bring something
into life was so much the opposite
of the place I found myself in. I was able to make something positive
from the negative, although
this process was long and slow and non-linear of course. Now, if I
express something true to
myself, something genuine then I have created something which takes
on a life of its own and which,
hopefully, may strike a chord with someone else, or make them feel
that they are not alone. The thing is that nothing which touches us
deeply (whatever it may be) ever goes away and those things always
leave a mark - in one way or another. We can't get rid of them or
forget them so we absorb them somehow and they become part of the
filters through which we see the world.