More on that Discursive Shift

It's funny, I have felt stumped by a niggling worry that I cannot place myself at the moment, that I don't know where I am, as if this is a problem to be overcome and solved before I can resume an art practice or a commitment to writing regularly.

I wonder how much projecting ourselves into the future is locationally influenced. In Greece I let it go, circumstances forced me to live according to my mood, the space my inner world seemed to create beyond my physical limits in which to line the path before me on that day: the bad mood signifying a sullen commitment to my internal movements, a good mood turning my insides outside through a beaming smile.

Anyway. The manner in which my lack of placement has been known to me is the unease that my artwork - and particularly my blog - has been accompanied by when I have thought about it. I have noticed that my clothing style has changed in able to converse more relevantly with my London setting, and now I look on the works that I produced in the last year with the same distancing judgment, that my work was fine for the setting I was in but it must now be updated, freed of its innocence somehow, its safe position as outsider looking in, automatically possessed of the outsider/artist eye.

What am I, who am I here? Good questions. What I am is someone trying to define myself in this mix, knowing intellectually that definition should be treated with suspicion. Who am I? Silence. Silenced by the lack of definition.

I let the new thoughts crowd in: am I a failure that at my age I am (only) a gallery attendant and not successful as something of my own? How successful am I at playing the game? being part of this city? showing that I am part of it? what is my art? what do I want to achieve? what do I want to create? what do I want to say? what do I think?

Who do I want to be?

I am looking now at a set of cardboard storing boxes piled up beside my table. They are each wearing a different configuration of light and shadow. I think to myself 'it's beautiful' and I reach for the camera. After taking a series of shots I put the camera down, and I think about this decision making process I am involved in while photographing: natural shape, being - according to a kind of faith that I possess - instinctively the same as the shapes that our thoughts take. All our inner workings follow the same laws that the natural world does and therefore we can understand our own workings by seeing the similarity, or instinctively feeling a resonance with these shapes, knowing they tell us something about the behaviour of thoughts, conceptualising, and creativity.

But this thing about what is beautiful sticks with me here in London. Beauty is unquestioned to the traveller in Greece and being a tourist believing she had the kind of eye that went just that little bit further than the average tourist's goes unquestioned. Read: my ego met no major external challenges. By contrast, London is immense and home to countless intelligent, questioning, 'creatives'; they have already marked out the territory for themselves. London is grimy and difficult. It is competitive and requires of us hard work. And it is so big that it is difficult to get perspective.

My experience of London has always been one of looking for my place, although perhaps actually that is just life. It was always expressed by radical changes in the clothes that I wore, identities I assume, and continues to. It occurs to me this morning that the question of place - geographically, psychologically etc. is an intersection that pegs together a set of queries that I am so used to living with that I don't even see them, and yet they are the flimsy abode that I have lived within since I can remember. It's funny how far we go to discover new territory and yet the new material is just more of ourselves uncovered.