What would my art look like if I had more of a Life. Confessions of a housebound artist. or How to find your Joy and change your vision.

What would my work look like if I left the house more. I am very house bound as I am raising two children and working from home and doing my art practice from a studio at home. I sometimes even use parts of our domestic landscape to make works. Mostly I use parts of other peoples homes that get sent to my home.  Conversation with a friend who told me that they were going on a month long residency abroad made me wonder  what would my work look like if I was not always at home. My friend replied oh that's easy you would just find those same motifs out in the world.

This was not really what I waned to hear, for a moment I had this vision that perhaps my practice was just so miserable because I am trapped and unable to work at long stretches of time without interruption. Instead I was being told that the heavy nature of my work was somehow integral to my vision. Sounds logical put that way but I was not happy. I resolved to get out of the house and use a material from outside the house in my next piece, my vision can be other than this. The thing I stumbled upon that spoke to me was a horses yoke. This is a kind or horse harness that was used before the industrial revolution to plough the fields using horses.  Bizarrely as with so much of my work it starts with my Jamaican grandmother's home. She had plough horses with yolks and farmers on her table mats and a lot of that kind of nostalgic olde England imagery in her home. But this was a result as the yolk was definitely an outside thing and it smelled musty and of horse a smell I like so this was at least positive.....



When I looked at the curvature and the shape I realized I knew I wanted to deconstruct this and I knew what I wanted to reconstruct it as.

 I was so disheartened to see that I had an extended metaphor for indentured labour and was again looking at work and the division human animal object.I had not been able to resist the notion of thinking of this a a kind of a furnished room and used fabrics from old chairs. Moreover the yoke is a kind of outside room a work room for the horse it encloses the horse in all sides as surely as an actual wall would although the horse has open country all around it and could easily overpower the one man that is controlling the plough. The raggedy worn vagina that resulted was a shock and really deeply upsetting I declined to show this work to anyone for weeks. A friend suggested it is really OK to show and I set about making the other 5 that felt moved  to make.  As a part of this challenge to get out of the house find my joy and change my vision I started working with horses. Normally a horse would cross 14 km of terrain a day. Many horses are moved just an hour or so a day for a tiny fraction of that distance. The rest of the time they spend in a box looking out. I was right back where I started. I know there are some aspect to this work that will push the rest of my practice further perhaps even into joy. I think the last work has an aspect of joy. This work lies on the floor and has a different feel from the others although it is made of the same materials.

Someone said in order to change all things you need only to change one thing. Perhaps that has happened here, and perhaps that is a key thought to keep in mind for changing your vision.