every man for himself
A Letter from the Island
I’M living on the islad. I was brought here by my work. It’s very quiet on the island. Quiet calms me. Quiet makes me nervous. I’m not sure I want to stay here. I’m not sure if I can leave. I always dreamed of being on the island. I dreamed of being in the place of absolute peace and ultimate productivity. In 2000 I made a work about living alone in a cottage in the Outer Hebrides and reading philosophy. Between 2000 and 2008 I kept returning to a work where I was living in an artists’ colony. In 2009 I made drawings of an artists’ community where I lived with my closest friends. I was always trying to visualise the perfect environment for making art. I wanted enough comfort so that managing my life didn’t steal too much time from my work, enough social contact to both ensure my emotional balance and to provide an external check on the relevancy and quality of my work, and enough isolation to minimise distraction. I dreamed of an environment that would keep me productive without having to rely on will power. Now all these dreams have become redundant. The island is different from anything I ever imagined. Productivity is not an issue because there is no imperative to produce, external checks are unnecessary because relevancy and quality are meaningless criteria, distractions are unimportant because productivity is not an issue. Isolation is guaranteed because there is nothing on the island except me and my work. I haven’t been on the island very long. In fact, it was only when I was invited to be part of the nüans book Apogee that I realised I was here. I started wondering what I could contribute and immediately knew that my current work was never going to allow me to stop making it long enough to produce a new, unrelated work, nor was it going to allow me to submit a pre–existing, unrelated work. Then I knew I was on the island. My work had brought me here.
Lucy Harvey 33