I have bene thinking about starting a new Substack account but I am not really sure I have anything to offer. I’ve tried Substack before but was in a weird place and I couldn’t tend to it so I let it go. I am still trying to decide what I want to use that platform for as I work to integrate my writing practice into my visual art/studio practice. I am in such a weird place creatively right now. It’s not a bad place. It’s just a complicated in between space filled with frustration and disappointment but also excitement and determination to push through this difficult time. It’s really hard to focus on my work when the world beyond my doorstep seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.

I really feel like this is a good time to rethink the way I approach the creative process. Old norms are being challenged and obliterated in every other aspect of our lives in this country. It seems ridiculous to expect my career to stay on the same trajectory that it has been on for decades. I have been making and exhibiting my art for 40 years now and for the first time in a long time, I feel a strong desire to push myself in new directions and to find a way to share my ideas and voice in written form alongside my mixed media installations. Hanging tidy rectangles in white box galleries with short titles feels so uninteresting to me right now. I can’t really articulate what I mean when I say I want to change the way I present my work. I have no idea what it should or will look like yet but I can feel ideas bubbling up and I am trying to wrangle them and sort them out and make sense of them because I really want to do something different. These times are different. I am different.

I think what I am doing here in this space as I collect things I have written over the years is looking for rhythms and patterns. Storytelling has been such a big part of my practice for years but I need to be more disciplined and organized. I am definitely not there yet. It feels good to find old essays and odd little list poems that I posted on social media that weren’t scribbled down anywhere else. I thought it would be cringey to reread them but I am happy to report that I like a lot more of what I have written than I imagined. It’s just taking me forever to unearth the old stuff and bring it over here because I am also trying to write new essays and when the old noise gets in my head, it sometimes slows that process down.

So, I am forever gleaning and sorting and percolating. Do you think I will ever figure out what the hell I am doing? Last night I reread that wonderful letter Sol LeWitt wrote to Eva Hesse and then watched Benedict Cumberbatch read/perform the letter and I was inspired to quit planning and fretting so much. I spent today embracing the nonsensical and I played a little. I think tomorrow I should play a lot.