Getting creative

Why has it been so long since I last wrote? Well, it’s partly due to the usual teacher excuse of the first term back at school after the summer (a lifetime ago) being an absolute vortex in which my time and energy disappeared for the best part of three months, and partly due to the fact I rather foolishly decided to write and direct a promenade version of Macbeth as the school production, and gave myself eight weeks in which to get it performance-ready. That feat accomplished back in December, and my classes now fully established and under control, life outside of school is now possible!

I loved the experience of writing and directing my first show in my new(ish) school, especially as I haven’t picked up a pen to write a play since I finished my Playwriting MA two years ago now. Writing work to be assessed, constantly having to listen to and address feedback on my writing, and being surrounded by people hustling to become commercially successful as writers ended up destroying any joy I took in the process of writing, and I allowed myself to develop the belief that I wasn’t really any good anyway. My life is busy and I’m always being pulled in several directions between my job, volunteering commitments, hobbies, family and friends, and carving out time to just write for pleasure has always seemed like an utter indulgence I can’t afford. How anyone makes art while also holding down a day job and maintaining a family and social life, I really cannot comprehend. As such, I’ve been really interested over the past couple of months, as I’ve juggled my own creative project with Life, in exploring the creative process of women working in environments where it would seem that they shouldn’t have time to fully devote themselves to their art. It’s taken me to some wonderful places, and given me plenty of inspiration.

In early October, I made a pilgrimage to my favourite place of female and communal creativity; Charleston. The weather was gloriously sunny, the air was crisp and scented ever so gently with woodsmoke, and the garden was full of late summer flowers still holding on to a last blaze of life. My friend and I wandered through the rooms that manage to feel like everyone who lived here has just popped to the shops for half and hour and will be right back, and felt the creative energy of the space vibrate through us. I love how every surface is decorated in pattern and colour, and every nook and cranny has a delightful, carefully (or perhaps casually - who knows?) objet d’art placed just so to catch the light or speak to the painting above it. I loved the make-do-and-mend nature of the curtains - strips of random fabric sewn together, and the rods held together with paper clips! - and how you can see where the paint was rubbed away on the dining room table by years of people’s elbows. The house is a true work of art, created to delight and bring pleasure to the people who lived in it, with no expectation of anyone ever wanting to come and see it or monetise it. It’s art for pure pleasure’s sake, and in a world where we are increasingly only placing value on art for how much money it can generate, it was a joy to be reminded of how we can get fulfilment and value in expressing ourselves in our domestic spaces - when we don’t have time, energy or inclination to be creative in other ways, doing something as simple as rearranging ornaments on a shelf or finding just the right vase for a bunch of flowers can be as meaningful as writing a story or painting a picture.

More artist inspiration came in Cornwall during my November half term, when I finally got around to visiting the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden in St Ives. Climbing up the narrow, winding back streets of this once sleepy fishing village, you find yourself going through a door into what seems like a poky little cottage - but head upstairs, and you’re in Hepworth’s totally unexpected lofty, light filled studio. Outside is the magnificent hidden garden where many of her beautiful sculptures have been carefully placed to enhance and reflect their surroundings, from which there are uninterrupted views of the sea stretching out to the horizon. The first work of art you see at the top of the stairs when entering the studio is a beautiful hardwood sculpture of a baby, modelled on Hepworth’s eldest son. It is so immensely tactile that I wanted to immediately pick it up and give it a cuddle - and the curator in the room told me that many women have the same response. She then gave us a talk on Hepworth and motherhood, and how her love for her four children - three of them triplets - influenced and inspired her work, but also at times made it very difficult for her to have the time and energy to create. It didn’t help that when her triplets were born, her partner Ben Nicholson - who was still married to Winifred Nicholson at the time - buggered off to Rome for several weeks on an art scholarship, leaving her quite literally holding three babies with no money and no support. She had to temporarily put the children in a nursing home in order to manage - she was so tired and weak, she couldn’t feed them - but amidst all of the chaos of childrearing, she still managed to do at least half an hour of creative work per day, saying that she saw the life of being a mother one that ‘nourished’ her creativity rather than depriving her of it. She certainly did not subscribe to Cyril Connolly’s theory that the pram in the hall is the enemy of great art.

Neither did Tirzah Garwood, whose solo exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London is the first of her work in over 70 years, and is an absolute delight (if you can’t make it to the exhibition, the catalogue is an excellent substitute). I went with my sister at the end of November, and we were moved, inspired and transported by the work on display. From the witty woodcuts she made in the early stages of her career while at art college - where she was tutored by Eric Ravilious, who would become her husband - to the dark yet whimsical oil paintings of oversized children’s toys in lush gardens, collaged models of houses and shops, and the beautiful decoupage scrapbooks she made to entertain her children, the exhibition reveals a woman alive to every detail of the largely suburban and domestic life around her, and able to turn whatever materials she had to hand into a work of art. She was devoted to her three children, and being widowed when her youngest was still a baby, she did much of the raising of them alone - but like Hepworth, she found them and their view of the world an inspiration. I loved looking inside one of her 3D models of a bakery, in which her daughter’s face can be seen peering in through the window, and outside one of her beautiful collages of a house, her daughter Anne can be seen sitting on a little paper swing. Much of her work might fall into the category of folk art, but it is important to remember that Garwood was very much a working artist, supporting the family with the money she received from her art, as well as her highly sought after marbled paper business. Garwood has long been overshadowed by the fame of her husband, so having this exhibition highlight what a creative genius she was too is long overdue. As much as I loved every piece of the work on display, what I loved most was knowing that Garwood had made all of it at home, her children around her, in between doing the cooking and the shopping and the washing up. Tirzah has taught me that Life doesn’t have to get in the way of art - unless you let it.

The hot ticket of the summer in London, which I missed while on holiday in New York, was The Years at The Almeida, the story of an ordinary French woman’s life in the 21st century, adapted from the genre-bending autobiographical-historical book of the same name by Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. Fortunately it’s now transferred to the West End, and I’m off to see it in a couple of weeks, so I spent last week reading the book in preparation. I didn’t realise that Annie Ernaux had always written alongside working full time as a secondary school French Literature teacher, and parenting two sons, and her dedication to her art and insistence on making time for herself and her writing amidst the busyness of ordinary life was both awe-inspiring and a little intimidating. If she could teach kids all day and then come home and do the dinner and the housework and still find time to crack out a few Nobel prize winning novels, then what on earth am I doing collapsed on the sofa scrolling on my phone of an evening?! The Years is marvellous, and highly recommended - an utterly unique telling of an individual life alongside the collective one of a generation, and having been a small child when Ernaux was in her forties, it’s given me a much better understanding of the world I was growing up in and can now barely remember. I love how she places herself and her life within the context of that of thousands of her fellow citizens, demonstrating how so much of our experience on this planet is collective and connective, rather than individual and isolated. No artist makes work in a vacuum, after all - it is this living alongside others, in the rich chaos of everyday life - where our inspiration is found.

So, here I am, another new year, and a firm resolution to get my pen and paper back out and a play written, inspired by all of these incredible women. I also promise to be more present here: I certainly won’t let so much time pass again before writing!