The Thief of Joy
I Limoni, 2025. Hand colour digital experiment with black and white 120mm film scan.
I have had a collection of moments in the last week that reintroduced me to the sting that accompanies any direct comparison between my life and that of others who, on the surface at least, appear to have acquired and achieved more. I’m not generally a jealous person, but I am as prone as anyone to feeling less-than, and I am ashamed to say that it often happens in moments where lovely things are happening for the people I most admire and love. In reality, I don’t generally like to be measured directly against societal expectations - I’d like to be somebody who rejects them, and hope that, as Robert Frost, in The Road Not Taken, memorably penned… ‘I took the one less travelled by’.
Right now, my most consuming struggle is that I’m not making enough time for art.
I think what many artists and creative folk in general struggle with is that regardless of how successfully things might be panning out, there are inevitable seasons of fallow soil, where the productivity is harder to see. In those times, I’m pretty sure we’re meant to rest and recover. I’m not very good at that. Additionally, I find that without an external driver - a project with a deadline, or a collaborator or mentor I’m accountable to, the rest of my life crowds in to take up all of the spare capacity. Just as my commercial client work ebbs, something else picks up in a significant way. The past week I was on rowing camp for Nino, as mother-help. This week is all about the new artist in residence for Te Whare Hēra, and the production rehearsals that Vinnie will be immersed in for his role in the local community musical theatre production of Lord of the Rings. Our family are preparing for a sixteenth birthday, a karate black belt grading, NCEA exams, and the acquisition of a pair of rats that are on the top of Nino’s birthday wish-list. None of the things are bad things (ok, for some people, maybe the rats…), but they’re very consuming. I’m also determined to produce some new work for the Massey Exposure exhibition, which is a thing all in itself.
All of that to say, it’s easy to feel like a failure when progress in one quadrant of your life doesn’t match that of your peers, or of your own expectations. This image felt apt - our lemon tree is heaving with fruit, a bitter proliferation that we are both blessed by and responsible for. I love that we can grow something without effort, on our clay and bedrock property, and that it’s one of the flavours I love most. Give me lemon meringue pie over chocolate anything any day of the week. I’m grateful for our abundant tree, and yet simultaneously irritated by the lack of flowers and overwhelm of weeds in every other part of the garden. That’s a comparison I could apply to work, health, finances and friendships.
A few weekends ago, on a little weekend away with some friends I’ve known since third form, we slipped into a bookshop in Martinborough (we’re all readers, and for that I’m genuinely thankful). I chanced upon a book that I’ve been wanting to see for quite a while - Annmarie Hope-Cross was a photographic artist I have long admired, who lost her battle with aggressive breast cancer in 2022, just as her book, called A garden is a long time went to press. I’ve known about her ‘photogenic drawings’ for many years, but I don’t think I ever met her in person. Her final years, post-cancer diagnosis and during the slow and difficult treatment phases, saw her making the work I am most affected by. She made series of quiet intuitive photographs with her mousetrap camera, that invoked the power of the sun to form still life compositions of ordinary objects - botanicals, fruit, medicine and perfume bottles. Her subjects were directly influenced by her life - I imagine flowers and grasses plucked from her own conscientiously tended garden, and medicine bottles that referenced and were inspired by her cancer diagnosis and treatment.
She epitomised the resourceful creativity I associate with many women, drawing upon her own domestic reality for expression. I find much to admire in the pictures she made, not least the fuzzy imperfections resulting from her process. Her exposures might take hours of garden sunlight to make, meaning that the changing position of the sun would soften the photographic render of the still life arrangements. Paper negatives disperse the light further, disrupting any clean contours or details. Her process, learned from the methods developed by William Henry Fox Talbot, reminds me of my first efforts with pinhole photography. Slow exposures, imprecise and heavily textured negative images, the soft-edged world that a camera like that might reveal to us. I had only seen black and white examples of Annemarie’s work before I picked up her book a couple of weekends ago. Discovering that she experimented with hand-colouring is another revelation for me - a connection to my own appreciation for the tactility of working with drawing media and photography together.
Annemarie Hope-Cross, Parfumerie. From ‘Still’ series, 2017-2018.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me most, when reading her book properly for the first time the other day, was the reference by Roger Watson in the essay included at the end, to The Road Less Travelled. Annemarie chose to forge her own photographic path, inspired by those who went before, but diverging from others to find her own way, and her own pace, to make art. I’d already quoted Robert Frost in the draft of this entry before I read Watson’s essay. It feels like there’s a message here for me, in that little miracle. Annemarie developed a method of making images and loved it so ardently that she persevered even when her body was failing. The expression of her reality was both aesthetic and figurative, nuaunced and layered with significance. She wasn’t chasing trends and seemed to be unaffected by the more grandiose offerings of her contemporaries. And, without romanticising her early demise in any way, she created a legacy that has affected me for its gentle beauty as much as its uniqueness.
How do we keep our eyes from sliding sideways - surveilling the journey of those alongside us? I think the answer is in nurturing the useful obsessions we’re prey to. When I’m merrily making my own thing happen, I’m so much less aware of or concerned by what everyone else is doing. I guess my answer to the social media-fueled battery of comparison, is to find my own happy - not someone else’s. I’m thankful for Annemarie’s book, which is a great and potent reminder of the merits of a practice informed by curiosity and passion, and not by a compulsive need to win the race that isn’t even mine to run.