Posting this after a hiatus but think it’s very relevant!
October – Open Source Arts Residency
It’s been an eventful month. Couple of weeks even. Went for a walk in the peaks and saw all the amazing mushrooms flourishing at this time of year. Then on the walk back to the car I saw a little beautiful snake on the path – a rarity. My partner says that spotting a snake is significant – a sign of transformation and shedding skin.
I did a beautiful residency at Open Source Arts at the beginning of October. The residency was framed as a response to Culture Want to Grow – thinking about the closure of spaces in Leeds (and beyond) and what that means. I was hoping to use that time to reflect for myself how that is informing my own art-making. In the end I spent two days by myself writing, moving my body, re-connecting with myself, the third day with the wonderful Robbie Coulson, and the fourth with a whole bunch of Fools I gathered, and we ended it with a Fools showing – to each other (the 7 of us), two friends, and two random people who saw the event.
I wrote three sort of poems during my time:
Culture Wants to Grow
I want to grow
I want to sleep
I want to lay in a puddle
I want to touch grass with my face
I want to get out of here
I want to be clever
I want to be seen to be clever
I want this to be easy
I want to be truthful
I want to know I am doing the right thing
I want to secretly watch TV instead of working
I want money to fall into my lap through no work of my own
I want to cast my phone into the sea
I want to know who I am
I want to understand this collection of beings & memories & decisions & thoughts – where do they come from?
I want to take all of my clothes off & lay in bed with you
I want to snog the room
I want to feel that excited feeling
I want to be invited
I want to stop trying so hard
I wan it to matter
Oh good god I want it to be organised
Manifesto for Mediocrity
Maybe we don’t need to be inspirational artists
Maybe we could make art that was like fine
I could facilitate spaces that are pretty good
Make a podcast that’s you know yeah that’s a podcast
I’ll sing a song that makes you think – that was nice
I could draw a picture that looks not bad if you think about it
I could dance in a way that seems reasonable
Write a good enough story
Make a vase that’s respectable really
Knit a jumper that you don’t mind
Bend silver for a piece of jewellery that you’ll look at in the shop and say “yeah maybe that” before buying something else
I could do all these things and more
If I wasn’t trying to craft the perfect show
that would prove
once and for all
that I am a really incredible artist
Loss of Space
I’m losing my cage
Shrinking
The spaces dwindling
Carrying an air of cold
Is it me or is everyone disappearing?
Come home exhausted
Lets watch TV and do fuck all
Am I casting away the past?
Shutting up shop?
What’s the line between hope and delusion?
Lifting the hatch of delusion to peak out at reality.
Trying
to keep
grounded.
Have joy. Make choices.
It’s so weird that everything is disappearing, and it’s the fault
of a fraction of the population.
Elon Musk thinks he’s the apostle of tech
& now I’m getting a job in administration
Here’s another extract from some writing I did:
It’s staring at walls time again.
Is this what making art is? Spending time getting to know what that corkboard looks like. Writing in a indescripherable scrawl – ‘well they must have been an inspired artist because I can’t understand a single thing they’ve written!’ What is is about making art/ work that makes me feel like a child again, and not in the free way. Like I’m wasting my time. You’d be thankful if I was a child doing this, whiling away my day making, creating, thinking for no one but myself, leaving you to your blessed relief and quiet. What a gift that would be to a parent! Be thankful I am not in your house screaming at you, throwing my fists against the floor and am instead looking at plywood wondering – what am i doing?
During the residency I got myself a real-life job. It’s been something that I have been pursuing for a little while. So a very auspicious time. Whilst there is a lot of joy in being offered a job (an adminy job fyi, not like an offer of some great role) it is a bit of a mixed bag. After maybe 10 years of freelancing, from very little experience up to the learned man I am today, it feels on one hand like a total backwards step to be taking a job, and on the other I have willed something into existence which I hope to be a stepping stone to a future in which I get to do what I love and I am paid well for it. Because currently I do what I love and I am very much not paid well and have been chronically under paid for basically my entire career.
Spent a bit of my head space recently observing artists/performers/makers who seemingly have got success and kicking myself for not having figured it out. How have they monetised this, and why haven’t I?
I’m hoping, though, by having cleverly negotiated from full-time hours to four days, that I can use that extra day to begin to carve out the work I actually like to build. And not in the ‘well I can afford to do this kind of work for free/cheap (and those erode the general market for everyone else) but in the way that ‘I’m WILL charge the rate I am worth for my work, and if people don’t pay that I’m not beholden to them’. At least that’s the intention.
Long game, long game, let’s play the long game. That’s what I keep telling myself.
Charlie Hammond 
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