New Year Resolutions and Returns
“Care”, Instagram, and other intentions
Aside from trying to exercise more, trying to eat less meat (and be hopefully somewhat healthier), and trying harder to do what I can to speak out against the genocide of Palestine, I’ve decided to post a few resolutions that are more practice related. I did this last year for myself, where I needed to write down my intentions for effective change in my mind set and goals to better take care of myself in a precarious and financially turbulent creative role. I forgot about this list and left it in the back of my annual planner. It re-emerged a few months ago and I was happy to read over it, happy to see that in the moment of its conception I wasn’t being hard on myself but directing myself pro-actively to take better care of my brain for the sake of my survival. Alot happened last year, it had it’s ups and downs but looking back on 2023, I was the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Taking care of that happiness by building resilience and structure for my mental health, with something as simple as an intention rather than a demand, was the best thing I could have started out with.
This New Year felt a little different, it came and went ad fluidly as any other holiday, no sentimental sadness for another year passing by, just greatful to have the privilege to be alive and celebrate by enjoying another glass of wine. Resolutions or change can be made at any time, and I made a lot of changes last year, but my attitude towards them is no longer about “bettering” myself. Instead I’m focused on sustaining a sense of me being good enough, and not comparing myself nor thinking that there’s some future me I must aspire to be. Happiness is hard work.
November had been a lot of travelling: driving, wandering, checking in for flights, retaining receipts, paying tolls, sleeping on buses, endless pleasure walks, constipating myself on carbs and dehydrating rapidly because hotels are wildly overheated. Someone I’m seeing had asked me “where are you jet setting off to this week?” and I felt like a prize dick for being likened to a corporate CEO. Then December rolled in fierce and fast with Santy on his way; my hopes of getting a final post in for 2023 diminished with the last of that good wine my mum kept pouring me.
This had initially started out as a reflective text on all the travelling I got to do, which was more rant than review. I was attempting to express my feelings about my future lack of funding to be able to conduct the same amount of travel as I have for the past two years while on the Freelands Programme. As that pot has dried up (as of the 31st of December) I am about to undertake two separate residencies in two different countries, one of which I have had to pay out of my own pocket for - a meagre €1,109 in total. This isn’t an overly high price for food, a small studio space, a shared bedroom, and the freedom to enjoy Barcelona and it’s surrounding area as much as I please for a whopping 6 whole weeks. Thankfully Freelands paid for my flights. I spent ALOT of time and energy worrying, crying and panicking over how to afford this without securing some sort of funded subsidy from my practice. Nothing worked out. Nearly everything I applied for since July of this year came back to me with a big fat NO on each email (metaphorically speaking). The decision was made for me to go anyway, as I let time slide into the cut off period for backing out. Slowly other paid things started creeping up on the calendar, so I figured I’d just pay back into the gaping hole in my savings. I am now more excited than ever to be going; which brings me to this post and the things I want to do differently this year.
I deleted most of what I had initially written because I listened to the new episode of the Blindboy podcast the other day while I was thinking about this post. He talks about mental health resolutions for 2024, and he said it all alot better than I did so go listen to that instead.
Raving not Ranting
I have a bit of a broken brain as I like to call it. Not brain damaged physically but I certainly survive my day to day with mental weightlifting that neither makes me feel nor look good. I’m my worst critic and consistently told by others close to me that I’m way too hard on myself. I can’t ever see what’s wrong with being self-critical; I consider it keeping my bullshit in check. However I end up exhausting myself with false knowledge of how others perceive me, because I invent narratives to shape my self-esteem and it leaves me weighed down in a net of speculative insecurities that only serve to suffocate me. I delude myself into thinking that it’s a habit that informs growth, only to leave me feeling useless and childlike. I consistently allow myself to doubt people who love me dearly, and I do it because part of my brain does not allow me to believe I am truly loved by anyone. Which is why I think it is broken. There are plenty of reasons and causes for this which belong on a chaise longue in my therapist’s office (it’s actually just a metal chair with a cushion), reasons that perpetuate the pop therapy content I consume which doesn’t help calm or regulate my mind either. For a lot of my adult life the trauma and CPTSD from growing up left me walking around in a dissociative daze, on auto-pilot and chasing escapism any way I could. As a result I depress myself into thinking that I chose to pursue visual art as a path because it is a form of escaping some sort of real working world reality. I feel guilty about going on these upcoming residencies, especially when there is so much horrible horrible stuff happening (Free Palestine) but also because I still have this lingering sense that what I do isn’t real. This is reinforced by the majority of the world around me having things that are called “actual jobs”, which triggers an internal voice inside me telling me “you don’t work”.
In creating a positive intention, a resolution for myself, is that I know I’m not alone in many of these experiences and feelings. It can feel isolating because the infuriating infantilisation these feelings cause makes me feel completely alone, and it takes real camaraderie, friendship and faith to reinforce the fact that (thankfully) I’m not. I’m going to start adopting a narrative that looks out rather than in, and one way I hope to do that is through this Substack. Committing to it as a space to constructively discuss good practices with both visual art and mental health, developing a meaningful cross collaboration of the two. I succinctly know deep in my soul that I can’t have one without the other. I chose to pursue art because repeatedly all other paths and possibilities either failed me or offered me a future I didn’t like the look or smell of. It was a choice even though it didn’t feel like one, like many other choices I had to make which felt more like obligations. It’s the art world that is a difficult, treacherous and broken place, not my work, and especially not my brain - but that’s up to me to do the work on that.
I hope to post more this year. I’m not going to restrict myself to deadlines before I even properly get started because my life and schedule never work that cleanly. I’m pencilling in an aim for 10 posts by December. I’m hoping to make them more considered long form essays, blended art writing and criticism, and more reflective moments on the things I’m processing in my studio and on the professional side of of things. All in all I don’t want this to feel like a place to rant, I can do that in the pub (sorry in advance to my friends). I want this to be resource for me and an opportunity to share it with those whom want to read about it.
This means I’m going to (at some point in the next six months) transfer this substack to a paid subscription as I want to start creating (some) practice related income more meaningfully and not crossing my fingers at every single application outcome. I don’t tend to make much work that is for sale, although that’s something else I need to start investing time in too. I have yet to decide how much and in what way I will be asking for people’s monetary support, it won’t be much, but it will go a long way.
It’s just an app, right? WRONG
How we share our work, what we choose to share and our attempts to develop an audience for it online has now become crucial to remaining relevant and accessible. Much like summer holiday pictures, party selfies and relationship statuses; our art practices are another performance of self advertising shaped by the branding that social media encourages. I follow nearly 1000 artist pages on Instagram, and regardless of how those individuals or groups manage their pages or the work they make; I rarely seek them out, and many become lost in the digital sea of dead scrolling. Most of the time I don’t even know their actual names and that makes me sad. Social media is sold as a space for art and artists to thrive yet is a silent denominator in how we are all dutifully taking part in the generic circle jerk of “I’m an artist” identity economy. I will never and wont ever forget Eamon Maxwell giving a talk on working with curators during my MFA where he declared: “Get on Instagram because that’s where curators do their research.” It was fucking gross but an honest piece of professional advice; I begrudgingly downloaded the app on my pathetic smart phone and got started. Fast forward four years and an online presentation by the founder of Guts Gallery in London is repeating the same advice, albeit a more expanded understanding of the gram. It wasn’t anything new and certainly nothing particularly helpful: share EVERYTHING, make sure to follow and like curator’s posts, make sure you are active at least several times a week to keep the algorithm happy. I could have weeped at that last statement. Just like how farmers are required to produce animals that become meat cutlets to adequately fit into supermarket packaging1, making visual art that is destined to look good on the Gram grid was not what I had in mind. It’s a symptom of capitalism I know, but where is the demand for Gram agreeable art coming from? I don’t consider it to be an entirely institutionally informed hack yet is definitely supported by types whom undertake Maxwell’s strategy. Just spray paint everything beige why don’t you?
I think that this one social media app is carving out behaviours, empty career images and a false sense of community for artists2. Excessive sharing and re-sharing, tagging and pinning has become a parallel within art practice rather than being a tool to support it. Naturally it’s interesting to see artists who try to manipulate this app and it’s forms as a means of producing work, but these examples tend to fall into flat gimmick or are momentarily viral, granting the artist temporary semi-influencer status instead. Over the course of 2023 I’ve become even more slow and reluctant to engage with Instagram as it is not art. Yet without the advantage of funding to allow me to go and see exhibitions, events and performances across the country and abroad, I’d be completely out of the fucking loop. I finally deleted my Facebook page after nearly two years of complete inactivity, the two years previous were for the sake of operating the Catalyst Arts group page. Its violent blue and white interface is as upsetting as the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s application portal3. I don’t miss it or miss out on anything, so why is it so hard for me to do the same with the Gram without feeling I’d be committing some type of career self-harm?
To be honest, I don’t want to delete the Gram, I need to develop better boundaries with it, likewise I would want many of my comrades and other artists to do the same. If your practice success, bank account balance as well as social life is dependent on it, naturally it creates a pressure to conform to a sense of branding. Fitting a personal come professional image into a 1000 square pixel box is a tight squeeze, even if you choose to operate separate accounts. How much work out there is impossible to share because of the nature of it not suiting the gram aesthetic? And what impact on aesthetics is being created by a simple app that encourages the totalisation of “aesthetics”? Additionally Instagram has become a professional come social place, which causes boundaries to blur and in professional situations, this becomes a problem. This year I experienced severe crossing of boundaries by a curator who was incompetent and felt they had the right to message my Instagram, asking me to check emails that were of no urgency. When I wouldn’t reply, they then proceeded to message my private number, which was a shock since I never gave it to them. This type of behaviour is not too far off being asked to work for free, and then being spoken down to when you say you won’t - another situation I experienced this year. Its not all arts organisations, institutions, curators and programmers who do this4, but there is now a culture where people in their jobs go on the gram and consider it a place where they can access artists, both in a social manner and a professional one, as if there is no formal respect expected there. This can cause a rift to occur where artists have to consider moving their own goal posts so that they can get opportunities, and still applaud the other party when they score. For example, having to accept inappropriate or disingenuous friendliness from a programmer because you don’t feel you would be considered for an opportunity otherwise - sucks. Having a blurred boundary of friendship and professional relationship is weird, and in many other work settings would cause a degree of power imbalance and discomfort for the more inferior party. The gram, I feel only exacerbates this blurriness. I crave intimate connections and genuine interest in my work, I cannot and will not falsify my desires for the sake of hope in acquiring opportunities, it just makes me sad. I’m sure it exhausts others too. Let’s not pretend. We are not actors in our own lives as much the gram reinforces an epidemic of main character complexes.
The Gram is a massive contributing factor to my regular bouts of devastating FOMO, competitiveness and the worst of all: envy. Social media is designed to bring out the worst in you, and regularly reduces me to being an insecure and desperate teenager. Not to mention it’s hateful and reductive practices such as shadowbanning those who currently demand a ceasefire in support of Palestine. This type of political silencing on a platform that necessarily has become a place of work for many is even more of a reason to change the way one engages with it.
So this year I’m going to try and change my approach; not to feed and mollycoddle any such algorithm which will not serve me in the long run, nor try to sculpt my work or representation of it to look hot for a curator to smash the like button and grant me a moment of promotional pleasure. I want to use the app constructively rather than passively. Maybe it will work or maybe it wont, maybe I’ll continue to be disinclined to care and naive enough to ignore the reality of its inevitable role in art, but that would be choosing to remain the passive annoyed teenager. I can only make it work for me by putting the work in, including having boundaries with the amount of time I spend on it. I hope that some day I will stop looking at my own work or ideas and pre-emptively imagine it squashed on a little grid on my little phone.
(ironically) follow Brown Studio on Instagram!
Don’t worry, I’ll tell you later.
This year I also want to curb my sharing. If I’m to engage more productively and meaningfully with the Gram then I should probably increase my sharing, but thats not the type of sharing I’m talking about. I developed a habit these past couple of years where I would get way too ahead of myself with ideas and plans for work I wanted to make. This then turned into a bad habit of me sharing and fluffing up these ideas either in casual conversations or professional studio visits. The majority of them never materialised, like a heavy 90% majority. They never made it to my notebook or my desk, and so they stopped being ideas and I found myself weighed down with nothing but endless notions that I clung to like an addict. I don’t know where this came from, but I am almost positive it started when I was accepted on to the Freelands Programme, no fault of theirs of course. Suddenly the opportunity of an income (a small one but an income no less) with additional funds and opportunities put my brain into a spin. The imposter syndrome was perhaps a contributing factor which took a long time to melt away and definitely impacted my ability to even get started. I clearly remember that there was a snap change of direction in my mindset once I had these assurances - I guess there was something in me that saw far too much potential to the point of delusion. I began concocting wild and impossible expectations on the things I wanted to make and research. I was still coming back up for air from a pretty difficult couple of years previously (pandemic, mum’s illness, my family falling apart, and a huge break up). I quite plainly plonked myself into executive dysfunction and sat in it, trying to survive on the hope I was giving myself, which in the end wasn’t nourishing me. Hope nourishes no one, it is a coping strategy that only offers reprieve when meaningful growth is at hand. Otherwise it feels like a bad joke after a while, well to me anyway, but I’m a total fucking pessimist at the best of times. The programme was a great experience, I couldn’t have asked for better; to be given some cash, left alone and checked up on once in a while by people genuinely interested in what I was doing. It’s a real shame it isn’t continuing. It certainly worked wonders for my confidence and mental health, where after my show in Platform Arts in 2021 I didn’t have many prospects to look forward to (nor the means to even have prospects). Now that I’m two years on and with a very different outlook on my life and work than I had when I started, I want to nip this over diluting of “potential” in the bud. My friends and colleagues might not have a clue what I’m talking about and I wouldn’t blame them. It’s in the moments, hours and days of isolation and working alone that these thoughts and musings had the most time to grow and invade every available space in my mind. As Blindboy said it, I was “living in my head” because it was how I coped, it was sometimes the safest place I could be. I would end up sitting still and just daydreaming the afternoons away until I would give up and go home, as if I were a civil servant waiting the work day away. Still nothing done, still no growth. Part of me was definitely trying to grab people’s attention with my ideas, much like a good Instagram story, however I only ended up still being empty handed. I could be shoulder deep in making new work and busier than ever, but still going home with my head full of hot air with all these great ideas full of “potential” that I know will amount to nothing. So if I don’t talk to you much about my work this year, it’s because I’m trying to work on my work and not construct a false narrative around it. Of course, feel free to ask :)
Let’s just put care to bed now, she’s tired
Last but not least, and I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I would like to see the use of “care” as a brand technique to be left in 2023. It completely undermines the very action care requires by becoming a label that performs a digestible idea of care, rather than be care. I understand that following trends or keeping up with your contemporaries is prevalent in any sector, but it does not define how any one works. Care is a chameleon that takes many forms, most of which are not granted the proper credit to those who action it, make it their livelihoods and are usually the last people whom anyone cares about - ironically. Care should be a part of anyone’s daily practice and professional work, it is not something to be used to gain a following, a sale or clout. Care is sadly, in our neoliberal world, an almost radical act. Care is something I can’t really quite describe and I’m certainly not an expert on it either but I can’t keep seeing and hearing people use a term to the point where it’s meaning has become more about professional image than actual practice. Especially in art where everything becomes reduced to representation rather than action these days. If you want to enact care, make it a policy of your own, not a brand choice or it will go out of fashion like everything else, and that is very very sad.
My good friend Cecelia Graham was very busy last year but started something great. An initiative called Companion Planting that aims to start small and grow into something that is a space where the unique crossover of personal feelings and professional difficulties in arts settings can be expressed, shared, supported and develop into stronger conversations that look towards meaningful learning rather than outcomes. It is not a collective, it is not an attempt to be anything that is geared towards CV building or implying exclusivity. It is the first time I sat down in a group, where we had delicious homemade drinks and food, did activities, had chats and were given the emotional space that can be lacking in art circumstances. I wish her every best wish over the coming months as this little seedling grows and develops roots. I hope someday it will flower with all the other little fruits, veggies and weeds this project will undoubtedly produce. The word care doesn’t even get mentioned much, because the meetings in themselves are an act of care, and I say more of that please.
I look forward to writing, working and living this year. 2024 feels auspicious but maybe I just feel good right now because the sun is out today.
Go n’éiri an bóthar le bualadh leat. Go mbeadh an ghaoth i gcónaí ar do dhroim. Go dtuit an ghrian go te ar d’aghaidh. Titeann an bháisteach bog ar do pháirceanna.
Agus Saoirse don Phalestín!
(May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun warm your face. May the rain fall on your fields. And Free Palestine!)
From Cara Holmes’ feature doc on artist and shepherdess Orla Barry, describing her precious ewes bodies becoming fodder for market demands.
At the opening of my exhibition An Intimate Public this year, an attendee came in and literally moved one of my works in front of me for the sake of taking a pic, didn’t put it back the way it was installed, had the audacity to leave without so much as saying anything to me and had the added arrogance to share the pic and tag me in it in the hopes of me following them. This was a minor mistreatment and respect of my work but I am still (clearly) very angry about it.
Congrats to those who put up with that hateful website every year for the sake of the SIAP!
This part 1 of Paul Pascal’s substack: Notes from a PhD, is a beautifully articulated examination of how our professional world is intercepting a more loving and intellectually supportive socialability between artists.