Fragments and False Starts

Fragments and False Starts

Edited by Graham Lister

Featuring essays by Sarah Arriagada, Rowan Bazley, Dale Holmes, Graham Lister, Amanda Thomson and Fraser Whiting

2023

Fragments and False Starts

Introduction Where we make and think and talk and write. Where we look and succeed and fail and eat and sleep and start afresh and draw and paint. Where we read and rest and work and don’t work. Where we dream and idle and are curious and dissatisfied and later, hopefully satisfied. And where we return to again, and again, and again.

This collection of essays is part of a project titled Fragments and False Starts. It began life as a consideration of personal activities within my own artist studio and has grown to include the diverse and insightful thoughts of others about what a studio can be, where it can be, how it grows and might shrink at certain times and how it can often help hold all the varied, rich and fragmented aspects of an artist’s practice.

This volume comprises 6 texts, in which invited artists have each reflected on what the studio might mean for them at the current time. The results are beautifully honest essays on the position and potential role(s) of a studio. The volume seeks to offer up a sense that the artist’s studio, far from being a definite place in which consistent work toward successful outcomes is made, is actually a much more complex, often fraught, changing and malleable space; which is full of potential for artists to develop and create in ways that make sense in highly individual, personal creative processes. Each contribution to this volume allows for glimpses into different definitions of what the artist studio can mean for individuals; highlighting the fact that the spaces for developing personal creativity can be as varied as the works which these practitioners make.

Fragments and False Starts is a title that reflects my own relationship with the studio, in terms of weaving together or layering disparate things, sometimes in a stuttering manner. The acronym of the title (FFS) also seems quite fitting as it represents an often uttered curse when, inevitably, something unexpected occurs or a ‘mistake’ is made, in the studio.

This collection of essays and images provided by each artist and writers is published for the opening of an exhibition of my own paintings and

drawings at Studio Pavilion, Glasgow, in September 2023. I’d like to thank the contributors to this volume for their honesty and generosity within each text – Sarah Arriagada, Rowan Bazley, Dale Holmes, Amanda Thomson and Fraser Whiting, as well as Alison Harley and all at Studio Pavilion. This project, including the exhibition and this volume, has been supported by Creative Scotland.

Graham Lister

July 2023

Sarah Arriagada, Always Pleasing, 2022, oil and glue on paper, 28 x 21.6cm

On Being and the Studio

Sarah Arriagada

Windows to Freedom / Taking a Chance on Change

I no longer have a studio in the traditional sense of the term—an enclosed, dedicated workspace for the emergence of my artwork. I gave up my last studio, a small space I held for about two years in downtown Columbia, Missouri, in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic hit the American Midwest.

Right before the lockdown, I snatched up a huge drafting table on Facebook Marketplace. It barely fit through my door and ended up occupying a third of the living room. I hammered nails into the table’s tilted surface and hung up my work in progress. While painting in the communal family space, my daughter and then-husband witnessed my creative process in an unprecedented way. I, too, gazed with renewed curiosity, contemplating the drafting table for unusually long periods of time.

Given the constraints of my two-square-meter table, I downsized my painting surfaces to 25 x 20 cm panels. As it so often does, my art helped me take unexpected developments in stride and adapt to change. In those first quiet months of the stay-at-home order, my practice evolved at a pace of three full “studio” days per week. I felt fortunate and was productive. There was freedom in being able to work from home and comfort in the presumption that this was a special, temporary situation.

A year into the pandemic, these circumstances no longer felt fresh and exciting. Something needed to shift. My work yearned to be liberated from its parameters—small scale, medium, and subject matter. Spontaneous oil crayon drawings on found paper remnants brought momentary relief. I undusted and painted coarse canvases I hadn’t touched in months and felt the exploration was worthwhile. Going through my photo archive, I felt lighter, motivated. Eventually, I got rid of the drafting table.

Yet limitations continued to strain not only my work, but also my day-to-day life and my marriage, which had been rocky for years. I remembered what

I’d learned as an artist—to trust my intuition and resourcefulness, and to be open to new frameworks—and, in 2022, my husband and I divorced. Making art is a practice; it has conditioned me to continually recalibrate my evolving values with my daily actions. Throughout this familial crisis, I made space for the solid inner knowing I had cultivated: effort and risk brought growth and alignment if I met each day with thoughtfulness and care.

Resting in the Making / Making in the Resting

If you’re an artist, your practice will be alive even in the most quiet or distracted times of your life. Hibernating isn’t death. Never doubt your creative self. We all go through periods of rest and reflection and periods of activity and inspiration. Why would our art-making be unaffected by these cycles? Not-doing is also empowering. I have found that a hiatus always brings me to a refreshed outlook on my work, a greater awareness of alternative solutions, and a matured sense of self.

I still work in my living room, making art sporadically at night or on the weekend with whatever I have at hand. In a feverish few weeks last summer, I created an entire body of work while my daughter slept. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, I repurposed old monotypes and by-products of my 2020-21 oil painting process, pairing them with spontaneously created watercolour studies. To this day, these twenty or so collages remind me that everything is always possible.

Often, only very few intentional moves are necessary to create meaningful work. This unrushed, meditative stance on life and being an artist has been transformative for me. I now prefer to wait, patient and observant, for the right conditions to be in place rather than depleting myself by frantically working against all sorts of obstacles.

Since that drafting table entered and left my life in 2020, I’ve spent a lot of time in the now-expanded studio of my body and mind. Letting go of the expectation to create physical works of art has allowed my intuition to grow and strengthen while opening up an internal space for images to surface and guide my daily life. These images, relevant on a personal level, may not be ones I draw or paint, but I sense that they are and will be important to my creative practice.

Sarah Arriagada, Red Night, 2020, oil on panel, 25.4 x 20.3cm

The Infinite Studio / Cultivating Fertile Spaces

My expanded studio is the internal space where ideas and visions emerge. It is where I feel the excitement for new artistic endeavours and the urge to handle specific materials. My expanded studio extends beyond my so-called borders and encompasses external, public places as well: the street and the woods where I wander and wonder, letting my feet, perceptions, and reflections flow and guide me. In my expanded studio I read, travel, daydream, and talk with friends; I cultivate space for my subconscious to make the connections my conscious mind can’t. The expanded studio is in my sketchbook, my phone, and my backpack, too—the material archives that help me make sense of patterns, trains of thought, and the things I value.

The expanded studio holds unfathomable space. Here there is room for the anticipated and the unexpected, the satisfying and the shattering. After a few years living and working in my expanded studio, there is much I have learned. Sometimes, my creations seem tentative, fragile, and unsure of themselves, but missing the mark is just as powerful as hitting it. I’m grateful for both successful and unresolved moments. They are equally important. Both moments can teach me, and both moments contain deep beauty and richness when I allow my loving gaze to touch them.

Inspiration and guidance often come to me in states of ease, surrender, and bliss. I have learned that I tend to fall into such moments when I regularly rest, meditate, move my body, and immerse myself in nature. When I am able to quiet the thinking mind, I make space for authentic, carefree, and unburdened play, which in turn allows for discovery and innovation to arise.

The true wonder of the idea of a contained, physical studio and the reality of the many spaces art can emerge or be cultivated in reflects our own inventiveness. Precarious circumstances have shown me that the world, inside and out, is my studio; when I open myself to the possibility of creating in any moment, the external circumstances I need to make art expand indefinitely. Making art teaches that it is possible to hold discomfort and ease with the same equanimity. It reminds us of our ability to deal with change, of the concentration that supports freedom, and of the intuition and integrity required to constantly realign our evolving values with the lives we live and the art we make.

Sarah Arriagada, Sprung, 2021, oil on sewn canvas, 30.5 x 20.3cm

The Perpetual Studio

Rowan Bazley

A perpetual stew is a foodstuff made in a pot to which stock, vegetables or meat are added but is never completely empty. The creator continually adds new ingredients causing the soup to become richer with complexity in each iteration. In “From Pot-au-Feu, Many Happy Returns”, Arthur Prager refers to his twenty-one-year-old stew as a “child, wife and mistress”. He elaborates on saving time by taking from his Pot-au-Feu instead of cooking from scratch. Eventually, the Pot-au-Feu bears little resemblance to its first self. As a result, Prager’s dinner guests witness only a snapshot of the same continually changing meal each time they are invited over for tea.

When I completed art school I was hired as a full time kitchen porter at a restaurant in Finneston. I also worked three mornings a week as a cleaner in a bar. I had these two jobs to pay for a studio I was renting with four friends in a former bisexual members club in the city centre.

The discreet club was likely shut down before the pandemic and hence was left vacant for a while before artists started moving in, initially on the first floor, and then to the top floor of the building. On the eleventh of June 2021 Erika Silverman, Raymond Strachan and Debbie Young opened an exhibition in the shared studio in the building which drew on the activities of the previous tenants. The building was described by Donald Butler in a review for Map Magazine to feel “more like a vacated office (…) rather than a sex club”.

Rowan Bazley

Rowan Bazley, House, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 23cm

Fragments and False Starts

Cleaning dishes and mopping floors began to inspire the swampy, infected-looking paintings I was making at the time. I was painting small plywood boards with tattoo ink and concentrated coffee. I remember my friend taking me to an out-of-use staircase at the back of the building to show me a dead pigeon, which had somehow found its way inside and resultantly died. In diffused sunlight, the bird’s feathers appeared to have been carefully placed in a pattern of concentric circles along the concrete tiled floor with the bird cadaver at its centre. The stairwell had plants and mushrooms that were shouldering through the concrete, wood chip blocked-off entrances, and the peeling layers of paint. I remember thinking that I couldn’t make anything as scary and unreal as how walking up and down that staircase had made me feel, like a real real Gregor Schneider, where breathing in the air actually made you ill.

Rowan Bazley, 10th September 2022

Recipe for an eternal studio stew:

Every studio I have been in has poured a bit of itself into the eternal pot-aufeu of my art practice. Whether I want it to or not, these places add to the constellation of objects, drawings, and notes I am able to make, I am nothing more than the experiences I have. I remember going to a talk by an artist called Catherine Goodman at the Royal Drawing School in London, she was talking about a residency she had just completed with Hauser and Wirth in Somerset and said that she wanted to take with her a few drawings from her current studio, so that she would have something to either ground her or to respond to or to react against I can’t remember. I remember her saying it was important which drawings she would bring to this brand-new empty studio because it would determine the direction of the project and the content of the paintings she would make.

My studio is now in Govan and was once a YMCA, and after that a knitwear company, and then the office for an outdoor festival called Doune the Rabbit Hole. Before all of the above, it was at the centre of the Clydeside shipbuilding industry; before that, it was a row of whitewashed cottages. The building is grand and has wooden moulding and two colours of gloss coat paint on almost every wall.

When packing up my old studio in the sex club I thought about Catherine Goodman and how she believed an artist could steer their practice in a specific direction by choosing what to take to their new studio. All the notes, drawings and painted objects are not my eternal stew. Everything could be burnt, but all the memories of painting, scribbling those notes, and washing my hands with dish soap in the communal sink bleed into each other. These moments exist because of each other and have already left their indelible flavour. It doesn’t matter what I transported to the new studio, they are all in me.

Walter Benjamin notes that an artwork’s spatial context and aura are lost when disseminated or reproduced using photography. I argue that a work of art is not fully completed until it has been shown in a publicly accessible context. For those who still make art that can be touched, works leaning against a wall or in a plan chest can only be considered finished once they have left the liminal space of the studio. I am not interested in artwork created using software or generated by AI which is never published in real

life public spaces for this essay, because I haven’t entirely figured out what the dissemination of art in digital public spaces means for me yet.

As someone who makes paintings with oils and glues and pigments on fabric and paper, the conclusion of one of my paintings can only occur in public; by this I mean it must be viewed by someone independent of the process. I decided this around four years ago, as a solution to my propensity to continue working on paintings indefinitely and additionally, as a way to consider a picture’s curation and spatial context as a part of its framing. The dissemination of art Benjamin was talking about now often happens before a piece of art has left the studio but for me, it is not finished until the real thing has been shown.

Rowan Bazley, 5th October 2022

Rowan Bazley, gen dead, 2023, oil and charcoal on canvas, 90 x 120cm

Fragments and False Starts

So I suggest that if a studio practice is like a Pot-au-Feu, Arthur Prager’s dinner parties can be used as an extended metaphor to understand the importance of art exhibitions. Prager’s stew is different every time, yes.

When I completed art school before I got a job as a kitchen porter, four (different) friends and I were invited to exhibit on Grafton Street in London. We decided to call the exhibition Unbaked Bread, because we considered ourselves to me emerging artists in the most tender stage of our careers, kneaded and risen by our teachers and peers, but not yet in the heat of the oven. Exhibiting in Mayfair felt like we had dipped our toes into something hotter than we were expecting, I remember walking around Old Bond Street looking at Balenciaga and Acne Studios, and thinking of our graduate show as shiny new commodities. The work I made for that show was large in scale and had phrases like ‘Accelerate Your Career’ written on them. We made all the artwork for the exhibition in two weeks.

Each exhibition I show artwork in feels like a continuum, a constellation, a timeline, a thought spiral in a dream that you remember when you are pouring floor cleaner into a mop bucket. I am showing a snapshot of this weird uninterrupted conversation with myself and I am capable of nothing more than what the people who made me and the rooms I have been in have taught me.

References

Arthur Prager, “FROM, A POT-AU-FEU, MANY HAPPY RETURNS”, May 1981.

Donald Butler, “A CITY THAT CHANGES EVERY TIME I TURN MY HEAD”, Map Magazine #62 Twenty Twenty-One Eclipse - Reflection, June 2021.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (first published 1935), England: Penguin Books, 2008.

Dale Holmes

Dale Holmes, Welcome to Corpse Road Pack Horse Centre Tennis Club, 2021, oil on calico, 350 x 170cm

Welcome to Corpse Road Pack Horse Centre Tennis Club

Dale Holmes

Welcome to Corpse Road Pack Horse Centre Tennis Club was the last painting that got made in Unit 13 of a semi-abandoned shopping centre complex in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The shopping centre’s ground floor was mostly small retail enterprises selling street level designer fashion, vapes, mobile phones, a dedicated cricket equipment outlet, a charity shop and a café belonging to the Huddersfield-only Medieval themed coffee shop chain Merrie England. Up a flight of stairs is a food hall, a Burger King – which I will revisit later – and a knock off KFC called QFC or HFC or something or other FC. The centre is 51 years old, predating me by one year. It hasn’t aged well. With its three openings onto precinct, main road and ancient town square it’s more of a pass through and a convenient shelter from the regular pissing rain that plagues that part of the South Pennines than the retail experience destination like the advert says it ought to be. Recently acquired by a group of businessmen out of Batley the centre is being renovated slowly, cheaply? Empty units modernised and existing tenants moved into the new spaces in anticipation of its renaissance to come. This presented an opportunity for an artist without a stable studio situation. Abbas, the centre manager was happy to hand me a set of keys for Unit 13. I imagined Unit 13 had been many things. In my memory though it had most recently been a trainer shop – which is not a sports shop, a detail that felt important.

The heavy double glass door into Unit 13 were brand new. This was in keeping with all the other units regardless of what stage the internal improvement was at. The space measured about six metres wide and fell back around four times that over three levels accessible by shallow stairs of four steps and it smelled fusty. The whole floor area was covered by a well-worn and heavily stained run of high traffic grade brown carpet and the ceiling was low with mostly broken halogen strip lights here and there. The area directly by the doors was littered with old point of sale furniture and shop fitting metalwork, a cumbersome cash desk and other leftovers from past lives. This space would be ignored by me in the main, I would just pass through it. In the central area there was a brown leather two-seater sofa and another blue textile one, a few chairs, flanked by long expanses of wall space which would be the painting walls. The space at the back had a huge damp patch on the carpet that was being slowly fed by droplets of an unidentified liquid that over time had created impressive chalky wet stalactites. A few strategically placed buckets of red and white plastic were failing to do their intended job. There were doorways to corridor spaces and creepy rooms full of discarded materials and other forms of evidence. This hellish cave quickly felt like a perfect studio space.

Dale Holmes, Unit 13, 2021

Dale Holmes, Welcome to Call of the Horned Piper Tennis Club, oil on calico, 350 x 170cm, 2021.

The Painting Wall

I knew the space was temporary and that it could foreclose on me at any moment and that the painting wall was the largest area of space I had ever had at my disposal. These two considerations quickly added up to a new working method that combined speed and scale in ways that I hadn’t been able to explore previously. Up to this point, and due in no small part to working in domestic spaces or very expensive – read ‘small’ - artists’ studios in cities, I had convinced myself that I couldn’t make a big painting or that my limit was in the middle of medium at best. The studio was free of charge and the surroundings were barely suitable and for economic reasons the paintings had to be cheap to make. No stretcher bars. The paintings support was tote bag grade calico canvas measuring 350 cm wide by 170 cm tall stapled sparingly and directly onto the wall. This was then primed with an all-purpose decorator’s acrylic primer from B&M, let down at a ratio of 1 part to 4 parts water and applied with an emulsion roller in one coat. They were made using the most economical oil paint I could buy thinned to watercolour consistencies with litres of turps substitute for speed. The palette was limited and to the point, 9 colours, Naples Yellow Light, Prussian Blue, Paynes Gray, Buff Titanium, Light Blue, Aurelion, Yellow Ochre, Light Red and Burnt Sienna. The brushes had to be equally fast. Sash brushes with an acrylic filament 2 each of 25mm, 21mm, 18mm, 15mm, 11mm. Brushes traditionally used for painting doors and door frames, skirting boards and windowsills, brushes that held a substantial load and could fill out shapes and areas as well as give long sweeping strokes with sharp defined edges when drawing.

This was the space I had, and these were the materials, they were the conditions in which to produce some things and I decided from the get-go that I would start and keep going until the time ran out.

Dale Holmes, Welcome to Dance of Death Tennis Club, oil on calico, 350 x 170cm, 2021.

Danced to Death

Working in this way felt refreshing, there is a feeling of being able to explore when a studio space is temporary and unsuitable, precarious and found in a non-art environment, a stopping off point for a fast mover, a rat’s hideout as it scurries from place to place. These factors lead to developments in making paintings that are driven by expediency, affordability and scale, the speed of the picture and the duration of the painting and ideas related to narrative and craft breathed new life and insight into my practice. Developments I’m still working with and through two years later. In the end I was there between early September and Late December 2021. In that time, I made a sequence of eight paintings that drew heavily on a series of graphic works by Hans Holbein the Younger called The Dance of Death (1524/25) that charts the levelling of society and its strata by the supernatural figure of medieval death and a book titled The Call of the Horned Piper (1994) by Nigel Jackson, a practical grimoire of ancient witchcraft. These literary works fed into my interest in medieval dance plagues, rural rave scenes, natural psychedelics, the fact of the once trainer shop that was Unit 13, the hellish cave space and my new knowledge that the stalactites were created by a constant leak coming through the ceiling from a toilet in the abandoned Burger King directly above.

I’ve Started

Graham Lister

We would be driving the winding back-roads quite near our house, most often on a sunny day, after being out for a walk or something, and my Dad would get us to roll down the windows of the car.

I was really quite young, maybe around 6 or 7 when I first remember this happening, and when I think back, I remember the effort to rotate the handle to lower the back windows of our red Austin Maestro car. The windows were instructed to come down in anticipation of a specific friendly game, a joke my Dad had come up with. As an adult now, on one hand it seems ridiculous and far from humorous, but as a father, it’s the sort of thing I make up too. It was a wee added activity in the car, and an excuse for kids to do something a bit silly; in this case, to call something out the window.

On these back-roads, was the home of a man named Magnus Magnusson. Sadly he passed away in 2007, but from 1972 to 1997, he was the well-known presenter and quizmaster of the television show, Mastermind. On this quiz show, which continues to run today, contestants firstly answer questions on a specialist topic which they choose, and then compete in a round of general knowledge questions. If a contestant does not know the answer to any question, they often simply say “pass” and the presenter can return to re-ask that question if the timer permits.

As we drove past Magnus Magnusson’s house, if he was in the garden, he might have heard the voices of two young children shouting “PASS” as their car was driven along the road in front of his property. I doubt that he, or any of his family ever registered that this was done, and at age 6 or 7, I had no idea why I was doing it. As I grew up a bit, I came to understand the reference to quiz show and I would watch contestants sit in the characteristic leather swivel chair, showing how smart they were on all sorts of topics. My Dad’s game had, by this time a few years later, faded in my memory, but I do remember developing an opinion about the contestants saying “pass” during the question rounds.

Graham Lister, Yellow Belly, 2021, oil on board, 30 x 20cm

I recall thinking that it seemed a strange thing to do. I couldn’t quite grasp this action of postponing concentration on something. My young mindset was that if I genuinely knew something, then I’d concentrate hard, and the answer would come to me, and that would be that. I also understood that it was okay not to ‘know’ something; I figured everything unknown was just another fact or process that could be learned. Importantly, I just equated the word ‘pass’ in the context of the quiz show as a synonym for ‘I have no idea of the answer.’

Fragments and False Starts has allowed me a bit more time to think about how I go about working in the studio as an artist. I’m pretty good at planning my time and working out what order I need to make things, prepare things and mix things, and often that is what my work is really about. I have days of stretching and priming, days of reading and drawing, and days of painting. I always try and think about making things that I don’t quite know how they’ll turn out, what they’ll be or what they’ll do, because that’s where the joy in being creative lies. In fact, I do often say to students that I teach, that if you know exactly what something is going to look like and what it is going to do, then what is really the point in making it? As artists in the studio, we are after that new exciting thing that grabs us, that challenges us and that we don’t quite expect; that is what makes us tick as creative people.

So, this summer, I’ve been thinking about what goes on in my head as I’m making things. Sometimes, I’m guessing like most artists, I can make drawings or paintings that I can almost predict what might be particularly interesting or exciting about them. I try to be conscious of the moments that I switch into a sort of autopilot state as this tells me that I’m just doing ‘busy work’ – work for the sake of filling time. I suppose that to avoid this, I’m always trying to ask questions in the studio; with the most often-asked one being ‘what happens if … I do this or do that?’

It’s because I was trying to pin down what it is like for me to be in the studio – working and not-working – that one day I thought about answering questions, quiz shows, Mastermind and my Dad’s game. It all came back to idea of ‘passing’ on a question.

As I said, I used to never get the idea of saying “pass.” However, now, the idea of ‘passing’ on something is actually now a useful way to describe my studio processes. The more mature version of me has come to realise that it is

actually the activity of pushing thinking about something further down the line that is exciting. Questions crop up and I sort of know that I want to get to an answer, but in that moment I can’t give them proper attention. I might not have the time, the space, the materials, or the moment might not be right to try and really think about something: so I’ll pass. I’ll pass on doing or thinking about something – but will often scrawl a note in my sketchbook. Writing it down seems to make it a concrete thing to which I can return. It’s taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I can’t do everything at once. I can’t know it all, and I shouldn’t think I have to try to. I don’t have to have a very set field of specialist knowledge either. My studio is about trying and testing and playing and abandoning and making all sorts of new things.

Things in my studio are passed on and then returned to, all the time. Passing on something is, for me, far from an admission of lacking knowledge (a negative or shortcoming) as I used to believe, but is a way to positively defer thinking. Thinking about whatever is going on in the studio, or might be about to go on in the studio, can be pushed into the future, until the time is right, the topic is more pertinent or it just feels like a good moment to return to it. In my mind and in my studio, it is a little like an ongoing game of identifying ideas to be returned to and reflected on in the future. This can wait … that can be put on hold. These works can be stacked, piled or re-organised at a later date … I can pause this painting for now … maybe it’ll look different or will make more sense in the morning, or next week, or next month …

My studio, no matter where it is, how big or small it may be, how messy or neat, how productive or full of fragments it might be, is a space where I’m now in control. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve begun to develop the Mastermind reference. I like the idea that I get to be the quizmaster, asking the questions, and also get to be the contestant; trying to answer them as best I can. I think the idea of passing on working on a specific piece and of passing on thinking about what I’m doing/ have done/ will be doing in the studio is now a useful way for me to think about ebbing and flowing practice which is constructed around other aspects of family and work life. And in addition to all of this, one of the most important things that I know, when working on a piece, is that just because I might have started in on a question, doesn’t mean I have to finish it.

Graham Lister, First Pass, 2023, oil on board, 25 x 30cm,

Graham Lister, Second Pass, 2023, oil and graphite on board, 40 x 50cm

Amanda Thomson, Boundary Layers, film essay, 2023

Amanda Thomson START/ STATE

I’m trying to think about what studio is, or has become for me. At present my studio has become more of a writing desk, my materials words and the page, but my subject matter for a long time has been the outside, particularly the forest, and my making (whether in sound or film) and my thinking begins at least outside, so I wonder where and when the studio stops. Perhaps I’m writing about a studio which isn’t (always) about the physical space of it, and more of a studio state of mind.

TIME

I find myself thinking more and more about time, because that’s the thing that I/ we seem to lack. How the pressure of time to produce is on us whenever we get to the studio/ the writing desk/ the notebook, when what we might need is the time to just be. The studio is a place of production, it has to be, but it’s also a place of doubt, dissatisfaction, frustration, uncertainty and has to be a place where, at times, we feel safe to hold onto these moments too, and work from within them. How do we hold time in the studio? In the short-term, between our arrival and not necessarily knowing where we’ll get to by the end of the day; and in the longer term, in the pressure to produce.

WAITING

How do we wait, and know when to wait, when to go, take action? When do we trust our urges and know it’s not panic or desperation? When do we take that leap of faith? There’s a time when, through practice, an intuitive understanding, a gut feeling perhaps, kicks in, but when do we learn to recognise that and, even, trust that? When do you make the decision that prompts the first word, or smear of paint, or needle onto a hard ground; when do you find the footage that seems to suggest it will be the opening shot in a film? How much of it depends on your frame of mind, happenstance and the confluence of mind-state, idea and what’s before you? How much of it is luck, though, as we all know (sometimes without quite knowing), the harder you work, the luckier…

PATIENCE

How do we know that patience isn’t procrastination? Sometimes waiting for something can feel like waiting for paint to dry, and it will be, literally, waiting for paint to dry, and whatever we’re doing, we can’t speed it up, or we run the risk of spoiling something if we do. It can be like that with an idea too: it needs to gestate, perhaps ferment. Writing doesn’t have the same material need as paint, or an etching plate in an acid bath – ink dries instantaneously after all, a word, a phrase, a sentence immediately appears on a screen, and sometimes it can feel like it’s typed up even before you think it; but what about that space when you close the notebook or laptop or studio door and walk away, return and look or re-read, and see and/ or read something afresh. Are we thinking about what we’ve left behind, even if we don’t realise it? And coming back in a different frame of mind, at a different time of day (or light) can be mind-altering. Even within a sentence you might see that something that could change, or how the sentence itself, if written in another way or from another perspective, or by using a different adjective, verb or tense, might open up a whole load of new possibilities. We can’t always change the drawn, painted or etched mark in the same way, of course, and sometimes you stick with what you have and need to push forward with that in order to see what comes next. Occasionally it can feel like we are just treading water, without quite realising that the current has taken us somewhere quite different. Perhaps this is over-egging the metaphor, but what new insights, perspectives or feelings might drifting out of our depth lead to, even if we might not get back to shore, or the same part of it (and when do we know we’re going to sink)?

CURIOSITY

Sometimes we don’t start with a question requiring an answer, but, simply a curiosity. If there is a question, it is perhaps more, ‘what happens if’, or ‘what happens when I…’ and it can do to be with following a train of thought, seeking connections, or how one material reacts with another. How do we let ourselves be open to the what ifs…? Where do we sit, in relation to (giving) answers?

KNOWING

Estelle Barratt asks an interesting question: ‘what new knowledge/ understandings did the studio enquiry and methodology generate that may not have been revealed through other research approaches?’ though I sometimes balk at words such as ‘methodology’ and ‘research’ when it comes to creative

practice (‘rigour’ can be another one, depending on who’s using it, how and why). I’m thinking about the integrity of our consideration, explorations, what new knowledge and understanding comes through making, testing (though not in a (pseudo) scientific way that can necessarily be straightforwardly replicated) and what we learn from that testing? Playing with materials (and here I include words), the knowledge(s) that we hold – what comes from practice as research - what comes from making, as oppose to thinking about doing (though where does thinking about doing fit with waiting, and the importance of these (non) steps, above?). Alternatively, what comes when we just write without thinking about it, make with no end in mind, and seeing what we learn, what happens when…

FALSE STARTS

How do we deal with making that first mark, putting that first word down, and, when we do, how must we be wedded to it, or prepared to discard and start again… How many false starts do we have the capacity to make? How do we know, really intuitively know, that we’ve gone the wrong way, or when to keep walking and trusting we have a rough idea of the direction that we’re going in. To begin another metaphor, I make a lot of work in the forests of Abernethy, and I’ve written about the feeling of being lost, which Rebecca Solnit so eloquently explores and celebrates – we start in a place and go somewhere else, but who’s to say where we end up is the right place, or just one of many places where we might go. Like when I go through a forest looking for or hoping for one thing (a crossbill, a capercaillie) and end up finding something else (a wintergreen, a granny pine, an old car, peace); and sometimes without knowing you end up just where you needed to be, you find, perhaps, what you are looking for, without necessarily realising that was what you were looking for. Still, false starts can become just starts, because we don’t think we’ve got time to go back and start again, and we just run with where we are and what we’ve got, and it might take us some place different, but exciting nonetheless.

DISCARDS

What happens to the discarded sketches, paintings, words, sentences, paragraphs, film-clips, the stuff that stays in sketchbooks, what’s scored out or scribbled over in a fit of pique? Do they sit, face to the wall within our studio, or remain on our computer, or stay in our head? Where are we with the detritus that, in other days or in other forms, might sit in wastepaper bins or fall

on the floors of our rooms or studios. Writing on computers, the delete button can means we can so easily obliterate what has gone before, leaving no trace at all, and how we can’t quite get back to it, though, in the same way as a painter might scrape back and erase, the vestiges of what was there, whether in memory or semblance, still underlies, and creates a trace or an echo. Where once was the possibilities of marginalia, in pencil notes and scorings, and where once there used to be a cutting room floor, things can go in a flash, ideas might be shed, instantaneously, to be lost in the ether, and I wonder if we need to leave more space to mourn them, or find a way, somehow, to still save what might be the best of them, and even the worst.

LOSING IT

I love how Annie Dillard writes about the process of discovery that comes through writing, when where we go to isn’t where we originally thought we were heading at all, and being open to that adjustment in direction: when, sometimes we get to the realisation that, ‘the part you must jettison is not only the best written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point’.

SPACES

So maybe the question is, sometimes, how do we take the studio with us? How do we trust the false starts and know when to pursue them, whether it’s because (we think) nothing better has come along, or they’ve led us down unexpected paths to, perhaps, unexpected delights or discoveries, or wholly expected frustrations that we nonetheless will learn from in the furtherance of the next idea. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen after what we think might be a mistake or misstep, and that can be what galvanises us to push on and push through, and sometimes not quite knowing, trusting our instincts, recognising the time put into the space of the studio (whether physical or in our heads) is what we need.

[FINISHES

And when do we know where to stop?]

Amanda Thomson, Belonging, Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home (Canongate Books, 2022)

Fraser Whiting I began trying to write this text earlier this year in March at a time when I didn’t really use my studio for anything other than storing objects. I visited the studio sporadically only to fish work I’d forgotten about out of unlabelled boxes for an upcoming show I had in April. With fingers crossed each time I opened a box I hoped that there would be something usable for the show, and that I wouldn’t have to do what I presumed I should be doing in the studio – making art.

April came and went. The exhibition opened and at the end of the show the objects and things I’d publicly displayed went back inside their generic unlabelled boxes in my private studio. Shows over.

The thought of this piece of writing becoming too focused on the studio as a storage unit worries me. Writing about objects in boxes, and boxes in rooms, isn’t a particularly exciting writing or reading prospect.

A false start. What now?

Now what?

What do artists do in the studio?

This is what I asked myself after the closing of the exhibition I had in April. Conscious that I had this text to write, and an arts practice to continue, I thought that answering this question might offer up some direction for both this piece of writing and my practice. This question seemed a simple one to answer. I’d make a list of what I do in the studio to be able to easily write about what I do in the studio. No brainer, right? Wrong.

The easy answers are the obvious answers:

I work in the studio.

I write in the studio.

I think in the studio.

I build things in the studio.

I store things in the studio. There are even easier answers too:

I breathe in the studio.

I sit in the studio.

I stand in the studio.

These lists make it easy to picture a physical space which a person exists within as they think about their arts practice, create artworks, and make things. It’s a traditional picture of the artist in their studio: deep in thought and focused on creating the next masterpiece, with the rest of the world kept shut outside the studio door.

I breathe, think, write, work, and make things, but I am by no means

a) always deep in thought, b) making masterpieces (far from it), and

c) separating the world from my work. So again, I ask myself, what do I do in the studio?

I pace about the studio.

I meet people in the stewdio.

I’m alone in the studyo.

I eat chips in the stewdyo after nights out (more often than I’d like to admit in print).

I pay for the stuidio.

I speak about working in the stoodio, without doing much work.

I fail in the schtudio.

I make really awful work in the schtewdyo.

I think about things that aren’t the stuoudyo.

I maintain the study-o.

I get obsessive about white walls in the stuudeeo.

I really do like to store things in the stewdeo.

I use the fact I rent a styoodeo to legitimise myself as an artist.

I listen to music in the styudioo.

I mindlessly scroll though my phone in the stewydio.

I sit in the stewduo – not in a romantic artist-waiting-for-inspiration way, more of a “shall I just pack it all in?” way.

I clean the studeo.

I make things I like in the schewdio.

I’m bored in the stewdeyo.

I spend less time than I wish I’d spend in the stchewudio.

I complain about the studeyio.

I question if I really need a stuhdyo, while in the studioh.

That’s more like it now. A more honest and varied list, with some embarrassing admissions. Gone is the image of an artist alone in the studio silently pondering. The replacement person (artist?) displays uncertainty, worry, financial stress, practical judgement on occasion, and indecision. Here the studio is not a space separate from life and the rest of the goings on in the world. Instead, there is constant to-ing and fro-ing between the studio and the world to the point where there is little to no separation between them. It is as much a place for productivity and work as it is a place for inactivity and procrastination.

Through trying to write about and understand what a studio is, the word has become increasingly difficult to articulate as it’s meanings multiply and expand. The word now sits awkwardly in my mouth. A once familiar word has become difficult to articulate. I realise that it might not have been so familiar to begin with.

This text partly lays out the many possible uses of a studio. Some are obvious and clearly linked to an arts practice while other uses make less sense in relation to art. It makes apparent a disconnect of what is expected or typically portrayed against the reality which unfolds. The studio becomes multiple spaces/ situations/ uses which collapse onto one another. The issue I’ve found while writing about this is that the more I concretely try to define the edges of a studio, the more they shift and become harder to locate. The onomatopoeic spellings of ‘studio’ begin to test the reader’s recognition –how do you articulate and define something which isn’t fixed?

Fraser Whiting, Inspirational Quote wall art, laminated poster and artificial flowers, 2023

Artists and Writers

Sarah Arriagada - Columbia, Missouri, USA. www.saraharriagada.com

Rowan Bazley - Glasgow, Scotland www.rowanbazley.co.uk

Dale Holmes – Huddersfield, England. www.daleholmes.co.uk

Graham Lister – Glasgow, Scotland. www.grahamlisterart.com

Amanda Thomson – Strathspey and Glasgow, Scotland. www.passingplace.com

Fraser Whiting – Glasgow, Scotland ww.fraserwhiting.com