A Beginner’s Mind
Bindweed. 2020.
I’ve made a sparkly new website, which feels rather a lot like a new pair of shoes. I haven’t worn it in, yet. It’s still a little bit pristine and without scuff marks on the toe. I’m not yet comfortable, and could easily imagine the rub when I’ve gone a few miles.
This journal is something I’ve been keen to try on. Sharing whatever rough, unsophisticated thoughts are rising to the surface, revealing and pondering the developments of my art practice and maybe some of my more worthy client projects, without adhering to any particular set of rules. In recent years I’ve been studying toward a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, which placed me firmly in a position of being inexpert. That was something I found deeply uncomfortable - not that I would lack expertise, but that everyone would see how vulnerable such a thing would make me. Without wanting to be too sentimental, I’m considering my youngest son, Vincenzo. He’s been learning to bake bread. He’s becoming a master of focaccia, which plays havoc with my blood sugars because I want to eat it more than just about anything else in the world. We’ve seen him experiment with baguettes, crackers, and now he’s attempting pretzels. Sometimes he has a little failure, and it feels like a proper disappointment to have done all of that mahi, mixing and kneading and rising, and to not end up with something genuinely delicious, but he perseveres. At 12 years old, he is making better bread than I can claim to, and he’s becoming more adventurous with every bake. I’ve decided to harness a little of that same courage, and just let the notions and investigations and failures be seen.
Today the view outside my office is a frowning companion. We built this space in 2020, after the first lockdown, and I’ve spent many many hours up here thinking about my next projects. Outside the french doors is a garden that goes through cycles of order and beauty, and then, at this time of year, abject chaos, presenting as a riotous wilderness. In 2020, when the garden bed was left to lie untended, two things happened to me. I felt guilt and frustration at the endlessness of our weeds. First, I chose to photograph them, as a way of dealing with my disgust, and changing my mindset. These weeds are only considered so because we didn’t invite them to be here. They are tenacious, problematic, and actually quite beautiful. This early effort to make something good from something bad was perhaps a formative marker for my now-developed masters project, which delves into ideas about memory and colonialism, female domestic experience, and isolation. This image delivers all of those qualities for me, and I’m happy looking back at it as something that carries meaning that I both did and did not intend. I’m happy, because I think I am activating that beginner’s mind again.
The second thing that happened, is I got busy, ripping the same unwanted growth from the ground, making room for new things to flourish. Like Vinnie and his bread-making, I’m open to new possibility and flavour.
Part of my practice is going to be writing, and probably doing it somewhat poorly quite a lot of the time. However, should you choose to inflict my words upon yourself, I really hope they’ll do some good, make you think, reveal something true, or generally contribute a bit of honesty and grace to the world.