Since Sunday evening, I’ve been in residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown MA, thanks to a generous scholarship. My class this week is being taught by Joanne Dugan and it’s called “The Photograph and The Word: Showing what you can’t always see.”
I’ve been inspired by the the assignments and the examples that Joanne and my cohort have brought in to share, and have created a very small body of work that I’m both proud of and energized by. I have no idea what I can do with this work, but I’m thinking about it.
It’s made me wonder what I could do if I was able to really straighten my shit out enough to have an actual daily practice where I write or make whatever comes to mind. But that’s the thing, right? That’s what separates the people who stand up at the podium each evening to talk to us about their bodies of work, and me, in the audience, thinking thinking thinking, but wasting most of the summer in paralyzed despair. I don’t know how to get from here, this week of ideas and making, to a practice of making back there, wherever there might be in a few more weeks. I can’t wait any longer for a home to materialize, because I don’t know when that will come. And maybe it’s a myth, this bosom of safety that a stable address might provide. So, how do I organize my caravan to foster production and a spirit of risk-taking in my work?
These are rhetorical questions. I wish I’d brought paint and a folder of collage stuff, here. In the meantime, I’m hatching wild ideas and taking a lot of pictures of my feet, walking.