David Benjamin Blower

WE ARE ALL HERE SPECIAL

In this podcast, DBB and Lydia Catterall talk through the new album: We Are All Here…

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21 days ago · 12 likes · 9 comments · David Benjamin Blower

Here is a conversation David and I recorded to celebrate the release of his new album, We Are All Here. Let us know what you make of it! Find the album here on vinyl, cd and digital download. Buy a copy and help David buy us a mansion where we can host friends and artists and good things. Thanks!

The first time I met David he barely said a word. His form crumpled inwards, wrapped around a cup of coffee. The group was meeting for the first time and I lightly, though inevitably accurately, read everyone as extroverts; arms flung open, immediate chatter, more questions before the last answer had been given. David became my introverted comrade, regularly beginning the day with shared silence in the garden before the day’s work. He would listen to discussion - his body entirely still in a room of wild gesticulations. I’d never seen listening quite like this - with all his senses and all his cells. He was the person that could sketch a summary of the day’s debate that would fit on the head of the pin. He was the person that would ask a question that would slice through, across and beyond the ground we’d covered so far. And always with genuine curiosity, kindness and care. I have never thought of David as a quiet person. He has always been cacophonous. Polyphonic.

When asked to define paradise, Johnny Cash famously replied: “This morning, with her, having coffee.” Our first coffee of the day is sacred; times a million, when we’re in the same place. David’s last words of the day have been known to be ‘We get to wake up and drink coffee together tomorrow” and the excitement is real. So imagine a morning where I feel his thoughts wandered before caffeine - Where I note that there is something ahead of him that coffee is in the way of. I have watched David make music for joy, I have watched him make music for money, and then I have watched him be a lightening rod for this album. At times I’ve had to know when to get out of the way. At times I think he has too.

“I’m not a very good musician” he says, and my index finger tingles. Some years ago, we noticed that I have a tendency to put my finger on the tip of my nose when I’m displeased. ‘Not the nose!’ he’ll say, usually resulting in raucous laughter and completely forgetting whatever the clash was. There’s a microphone right there, so I lightly grip my trousers to stop my finger floating up to my nose. I don’t manage to get in the way of pursed lips and widened eyes. He sees, laughs, then describes himself as a sculptor; someone able to make a thousand decisions that shape the pieces in front of him towards a vision or a feeling. I was glad, if a little surprised. Finally we have recorded evidence of my decade-long knowing: David is an artist in every sense of the word.

For three years, I visited David in a single room in a house of multiple occupancy. For more than six years, there have been 120 miles between our front doors. Arriving was and is always an occasion to me, but arriving to this space was often hard. I felt new to the city and now we were in a house of parallel strangers. My circulation could only manage short visits in the winter. The bathroom was not a place to unwind or leave feeling clean. The best of the summer days felt like camping with a roof - We’d fling the uPVC doors open, letting in any breeze and the sound of neighbour’s toddler in fits of giggles in the garden. There are fond memories of that time, and we choose to keep remembering them, but in hindsight I know we worked hard in those years. Life orientated around the futon; a shape shifting place we slept, sat, chatted, ate. A squeeze for the four of us, when the kids were over.

David writes and writes and writes before he reaches for any instrument. He knows the words first. On many occasions, we would share this single room, both absorbed in our own tasks. When the time came for him to yell into a microphone, I would take a walk around the park, being sure to greet the great pines: Pistis, Elpis and Agape. Half the time I’d come home with handfuls of foraged leaves for a salad. David might already have his headphones on by the time I get back, listening to the last hours’ recordings and roughly mixing them. We’d pause to eat lunch together, crossing our legs on the futon and letting it cradle us both in the middle of the day. A vessel. He’d tell me all about the new plugin he’s downloaded that does exactly what he wants it to do. I’d ask for more detail than I really wanted, just to prolong his beaming.

A year after David moved out of the room, we visited friends on Jersey. Three of us stole away from the group activities to visit St Helier’s hermitage. The magical cave-like studio at the top of a precarious, stony staircase is said to have been home to a hermit named Helier in the 6th century. It is stark and sharp and jagged and grey, but I could feel its sense of home. Maybe I’d learned something about how a small, inhospitable space could hold you. David and I instinctively crawled into the space’s only nook and burst out laughing. Cradled in the middle of the day. I’ll always be grateful that our friend was there to take a photograph.

I call David ‘Beautiful man’. I call his son ‘Beautiful boy’. I don’t know if they hear it anymore, but I will continue for as long as they let me. What hurts me in the world hurts them too. I see them stretch themselves in invisible ways, sometimes not even known to them, to maintain their softness; their innate kindness, overwhelming empathy and animal body. I am often undone by David’s beauty. I am occasionally confronted by my hidden, harder edges - grown from perceived necessity - and invited to risk letting them compost. I think I offer him parallel invitations, in a different voice, at other times.

Last week I went to see Testament and collaborator Matthew Bourne set the words of Innocence and Experience to music. David set the same words to very different music some years ago - Two men I admire, filtering the same references through different lenses. I’m sitting in seat E6 in the City Varieties music hall, central Leeds, and it’s filling up fast. It’s a stunning venue; all red velvet seats, gilded angels wrapped around the rafters. In sixteen years I’ve sat here many times -for musicians, comedians, choirs, panels - and it’s never not special. I take in the room, then individual faces. Oh, it’s Jamie. It’s Harry. It’s Becky and Khadijah and Henry. We’re older. These are my peers of the last sixteen years. The faces I’ve seen at gallery openings, scratch performances, street takeovers, protests, community meals. And here we are, doing what we’ve always done: Buying tickets and showing up to see each others’ art. Yes, we’ve spent cash on a seat, this time. But I remember all the other resources exchanged; free rehearsal space, good listening, purposeful introductions, bottomless encouragement, discount codes, leftover materials, emergency sandwiches. It takes a village.

I have listened to this record hundreds of times. These sounds know my river, all the skies, all the weather; inner and outer. And I can say with confidence - When the world is paved over and airless, give me these songs. When my body is floating solo, unsupported and directionless, hand them to me; feed me them straight and watch the oxygen return to my face. Watch what I’m capable of with oxygen in my face. I’ll smash concrete til I reach earth, pushing into its nutrient density with my toes until my I am planted here. Tell me art isn’t nourishment. Tell me you can’t live on sound, image and imagination alone. For the length of this record, I won’t believe you.

I hear all corners of David in this record. I love them all. I hear myself. I hear us and our morning coffee. I hear my friends, my communities, our greatest hopes; the best and worst of all I see, hear and sense. I hear roots and vantage points and long, dirt tracks. I want to travel them all a hundred times over.

Why would an overachiever question their vision? I put the fuzz down to chronic fatigue for a few months. I also have a job that puts me in front of a computer a couple of days a week, so naturally my eyes would be more tired in those days right? And it wasn’t blurry. Just a little bit harder work, some days. I didn’t overthink it until I spotted a regular visitor - a feathered friend who lives nearby - and, for once, I couldn’t make the tips of his wings focus. I felt myself crane my neck forward and squint. I booked an appointment.

Are you familiar with the temptation to ‘win’ at your eye test? A not so distant relative of the desire to ‘complete therapy’, I think. A or B? I knew the ‘right’ answer, but it wouldn’t be true this time. I knew within the first few tests that something had changed. I braced myself. “I do think we can make a difference for you with a prescription” he said. “I can see these will be your first glasses and that might bring up feelings or questions. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

Having never worn anything on my face, I bought two, cheap frames to dip my toe in. One subtle, one statement. One ‘Oh, hi. Nice to meet you.’ One ‘Yeah, I definitely work in the arts.’ I considered this to be what an action research approach might look like in this case; start small, ask questions, wear the failures, let the process be iterative. My first ever pair arrived an hour before meeting an old friend for dinner and a gig. The first walk felt like being underwater. The change was subtle and nauseating. I swayed a little. “You’re looking at me funny - are they terrible?” I asked. “No! It’s just not like looking at the person I’ve known for thirteen years.” he said. I took my new eyes straight into a darkened room with a stage and a spotlight. The artist emerged at the top of the stairs and yelled the first tune to the rafters, a cappella. She was totally crisp, the rest of the room was hazy. It’s hard to know what was my new lenses and what just was. I decide just to take it all in.

A couple of months on, the way I feel without glasses is exactly the way I felt in those early days getting to know them: Subtle sway and discombobulation. A gentle sea sickness on land. The modes have switched - I guess I’m now accustomed to a new clarity. I notice my neck pain reduce, presumably from craning less and leaning back more. Softer muscles. Gentler engagement. Working less hard in some invisible ways frees up capacity for other things. Like reading. Constant lens cleaning. Looking at the creases more intricately.

This word ‘vision’ comes up a lot in the worlds I inhabit. In the realms of charitable objectives and organisational infrastructure, being clear on your vision is a prerequisite for starting. In the land of audits, how clearly the vision is communicated is a point for scoring. Politicians pitch their visions for a ‘better world’. I choose which vision gets my vote. In this workshop we will co-create a shared vision. Tell me your vision for this exhibition. What’s your vision for that? A steadfast and robust vision is considered somewhat synonymous with resilience in a tumultuous funding and delivery landscape. To question it is to potentially show fault or, God forbid, slow down. I see the phrase ‘updated vision’ at the top of the PDF file and wonder what that means. There’s no test: A or B? But could there be? What’s an annual review if it’s not about putting another lens on the page to see what shows up?

I trust bodies. I trust their chatter and occasional wisdom, so I accept the risk of this sounding cheesy or trite. I got glasses and it made me think about vision more broadly - Sure. It’s a leap. But I’ve been struck by the process, which is about supporting the function of a key body part, and it’s simplicity. How unsensational it has been. This is the most simply and directly I have been seen and supported in a change in my health and bodily function - that shouldn’t be striking but it is. I have written about the social and personal impact of bodies not being believed, and others have written reams about the years many people wait for diagnoses and support for access needs. But it turns out specs are in a category of their own. Around 59% of the UK population wear glasses, and in countries where the numbers are lower this is put down to reduced eye care rather than less need. I’ve joined the masses. People who need support with their vision are, it turns out, not the minority. It is, in fact, such a common and accepted thing to need help with, there are loads of well practiced pathways to support new vision. It’s not even a big deal. Changing how you see the world isn’t even a big deal. Taking the time to make the alterations is considered necessary and to not do so would feel uncaring towards yourself.

What if visions changed as vision does? What if as the wider body shifts, advances in maturity or experience, it was understood that the edges may blur and what was certain may become less so? What if it was the most standard experience - to pause, consider, update, respond? Support for the seasickness stage? Tools and community knowledge, free and accessible? Here’s an example of a potentially marginalising experience that’s gone mainstream. Fashion, even. I’m fascinated. I’m in the river of it with new labels, now: A person who got glasses in an afternoon but continues to live with scrappily understood chronic illness. A person who regularly collaborates in generative spaces with too much urgency and is also occasionally asked to proof read and re-approve a vision written three years ago with no urgency at all. The contradictions feel plain. I’m thinking about infrastructure, resourcing; what the ‘vision tests’ look like for more than just eyes and how cultures go about normalising some things and not others. I also just ordered my first pair of prescription sunglasses. Maybe I’ll write a part two on what this all looks like with a dose of added sunshine.

The first try on. Phone propped on my windowsill. Sent to my partner to introduce him to my new specs.

I hear the chanting before I see the crowd. The line stretches further than I can see; there are banners and megaphones and flags wrapped around shoulders. I’ve wandered to buy bread and instead I’ve encountered protest. The route to the supermarket is blocked and that’s ok. I am stopped, arrested by the strength of sentiment and cacophony of voices. I can hear at least three languages but perhaps there are more. They are protesting an illegal war. Their families are unsafe, their hot anger is palpable. And yet they are organised. They are hot enough to stop buses without worry, they are cool enough to offer one another care and safety. They are focussed enough to keep marching forwards, they are aware enough to hop out of line to speak to the man waving for explanation. I briefly catch a woman’s eye. She is yelling with her whole belly and I see her chest crumple on the exhale. She has emptied her lungs and I’m looking right at her as her autonomic system demands a refill. I smile - The kind of smile that I really hope says ‘I’m with you. This is shit. You are great. I’m so sorry.’ I walk parallel on the pavement for 200 metres or so. The bus stop is full of passengers waiting for the next ride, their bodies slumped on the cold metal seats, heads drooped towards phones. The bus isn’t coming, mate. There’s a protest two metres behind your head. I can think of a million reasons why a person may not feel able to look right at it, and it’s not for me to place moral judgement on the validity of those reasons. But a flicker of anger is woven through my understanding. For a split second I think about saying something, but it turns out there aren’t words for this scenario.

If you could guarantee one prayer would make it to the source, what would you say?

Though most will have found this song via Joplin’s biggest selling album, Pearl, the song's lyrics were written down at a New York bar during a spontaneous poetry jam between Joplin and songwriter Bob Neuwirth. “It’s the want of something that gives you the blues,” Joplin reportedly once said. “It’s not what isn’t, it’s what you wish was that makes unhappiness.”

I have spent thirty minutes rating my resonance with one hundred statements on a scale from 1 and 7 and now I’m looking at a graph. A pie chart. The pie tells me my most prominent behavioural attributes and preferences for receiving and processing information. I am presented with a summary of my way of being in the world. I am told how this is likely to show up in working environments. I’m reminded that this is not about highlighting deficits or working towards an ‘ideal’, but simply a set of tools for negotiating rooms where many preferences are expected to work together. I can confirm that I absolutely do not feel loved, supported, energised, seen or equipped by my pie. Frustratingly, that’s exactly what my profile would suggest I might feel.

Later the same day, I receive a generally kind and well intentioned email that includes a request to be ‘connected with any disabled artists you know’. Given what I do for work and how I form connections with other people, this is becoming an increasingly common ask; Please signpost towards any ‘networks’, ‘forums’ or ‘groups’ of disabled artists. I’m tired and a little grumpy after my tick-box temperament evaluation, so I admit my internal thoughts were not generous ones. “No problem’, I say in my head. ‘I’ll just hand them over. One sec, let me open the door to this room where I keep all the disabled artists I know.’ I pause for breath and decide to reply the next day, after shaking it out and sleeping better than the night before.

My chart ranks me as highly ‘social’ in my thinking. This doesn’t necessarily equate to being an extrovert, the course tells me, it’s more that any notion, plan or prototype has to be considered through various perspectives before it makes good sense to me. Good feeling ideas are either a product of collaboration or sketched with the wider People in mind. My partner, , has often said something so beautiful that I once asked him who first said it, assuming it was some relic of ancient philosophy he’d encountered in one of his many books. It turns out it’s all him and his beautiful brain. We only need laws insofar as we lack relationships good enough to trust. Read that again - In my experience, it feels different every time you ingest it. I won’t threaten its poetry by suggesting any permanent changes, but in a moment of digesting a test and a task that felt ‘off’, I did find myself replacing ‘laws’ with other words. The common denominator of these words? They skip relationship, breeze past connection and consideration, and land the user in a ‘place’ of hard data with no context. Catalogues, categories, time-saving, audience-expanding tools. Names and dates and numbers. I’d rather have relationships good enough to trust.

This walking conversation with Lunatraktors became a note in the middle and the start of a story, for me. That’s to say it made perfect sense of things I already knew and undid it all - both at once. This pair create ‘broken folk’; as music, as story, as life together. What mad? Whose mad? Which and when mad? Why? Just listen.

Dear disabled friends - I use no medical language in this essay, but I do describe a difficult flare in some detail. I know you know the drill and I’m sending love and solidarity. You don’t have to read this today, or ever. You can also skip to the second half and read about art on its own, if that’s better.

Dear non-disabled friends - What I’m describing is an experience that happens for me from time to time as part of my experience of chronic illness. Things like it happen to varying degrees for up to 42% of the working population in the UK (people noted as living with long term health conditions, 24% identify as disabled). I recognise that reading about it might provoke feelings - I hope you can be with them and offer a smile or a cup of sugar to your neighbour tomorrow.

‘Flare’ means different things to different people. The dictionary acknowledges both its slow and striking, noun and verb shapes. A sudden blast, blaze or flash - Perhaps a warning shot. A gradual widening in shape, an offering that goes beyond the basic; With flare. Blazing, glaring, bursting, glimmering, unsteady flickering.

In my shape, a flare widens. Joints throb, sinew taught, nerves zing and panic in webbing circles. Heavy limbs, heavy eyelids. Mouth dry, eyes dry, skin dry and stretched. Stressed. Tight, tight, pop. Quick, quick, still. Stiller. Stomach turning, heart racing, calories burning, appetite absent. Not always, but this time, morale dips, sense of self wavers. Frustration, anger, grief, delirium make their stops. A wave of acceptance when there’s nothing else.

She escapes to the forest. The forest and the lake and the trees and the air. Bare feet on spongey earth, moss, soil. Takes steps to immerse her shape in cool water. She focuses on sensation, one at a time. Warm day, cool breeze, woodland smell. Entirely fictional with space enough to be real. Nothing else to ‘get back to’, so let’s be here.

There is a limit to ‘listening to your body’. After the point at which core messages have been communicated, it can be right to escape. To the forest, perhaps. In such thin places, movement happens by osmosis; between real and imagined, known and unknown. I don’t mean this literally. I am not losing consciousness. I am surviving by losing unnecessary divisions, unnecessary distinctions. Someone throw me a life ring. But also leave me here ‘cause I’m learning. Incomprehensible contradiction.

I share carefully. “Hope you feel better soon”, or worse, “hope you’re feeling better by now” are well meaning but unbearable messages to receive. Words are short and energies are so timid, I send up a flare to one or two who I know have the landscape for this to land in. We’re in touch over the coming days and every message is a glorious object. A cacophony of colour and contact that lives in the room in a tone I can choose. This storm is longer than usual, deep rest taking the edges off the widest parts eventually. A week in, five minutes into a steady stroll that throws daylight directly onto my face, a perfect voicenote arrives:

“I hope you’re seeing moments outside the trenches by now, and if not I hope you’ve started decorating.”

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

My greatest fear is that artists will give up. Every fear I considered on my way to this realisation horrifies me, turns my stomach inside out and back on itself just to think about. And yet. And yet. It’s this: My greatest fear is that artists will give up.

It’s never happened before in history. Prisoners made things and hid them in their bunkers at Auschwitz. Handmade trinkets have been carried thousands of miles in migrant pockets. Medieval hoards gathered by everyday people show over and over again that we are no different from magpies. Stories and songs have been told and sung for generations, defining whole countries and cultures. Even in the most oppressive landscapes, human’s innate desire to enact our ability to create, to engage with beauty and connect with one another has always pervaded. I think it always will. I have to hope it always will. There has always been threat. There has always been pushback to this kind of freedom. But it’s true that the threats are more organised, insidious and interconnected than they have perhaps ever been; The age old tools of fascism operating a hyper capitalist context with Ai fooling folks on the daily. And an arts sector that only knows to stay alive by following the business plan, to more degrees that keep artists safe. My recent months have been full of the whispers of artists giving up. A background note of the interaction. I hear it’s not a fully formed thought or a wholly simple decision, but the toxic seed of an exit strategy is planted and, as much as I value autonomy, I uproot it as fast as fucking possible. No. There is plenty you can leave, change or choose not to feed. But do not mistake what you are putting down as your artistry - as your ‘artist’.

The blank page is a trench. Confronting, terrifying, if properly comprehended. The truth waiting to fill that space has no value to ‘the system’, the rules of the wider world as they are currently written, and that is frightening. As state control increases, the artist becomes more and more dangerous. It’s exhilarating and awful and completely disorientating to be deemed dangerous while enacting something that brings most artists a sense of place, safety and connection to a world beyond themselves. Burrowing, furrowing, enclosing all emerge as options. Or perhaps the opposite: Exploding, expanding into shapes and situations previously not envisaged, giving away all the treasures and promising them to people who don’t see them like you do, just so they live somewhere in the daylight. I understand all of these responses. They are all rooted in a biological need for safety, which is the most understandable thing in the world. Perhaps this is one of the many ‘lessons’ I’ve learned by living in a chronically ill body, which undulates between feeling like home and hell in response to no one thing I’ve done: All states are places to create. To decorate. To be, to be alive in, to be alive to. Magic is made in the trenches. Not because of the trenches - please be absolutely clear that I am not romanticising struggle, pain or poverty - but because the trenches are still ground. It is one set of conditions for exploring beauty on altered terms. Beauty is not always beautiful. It might also be. Not knowing is so important. In a world of colonised knowledge and certainty as progress and profit, thank goodness we don’t know what beauty will emerge. Thank goodness we can be sure it will, if we are alive enough to notice.

If I Was a Painter
Lisa O’Neill

If I was a painter with colours no end
I'd paint the whole thing simply again
Where everything runs into everything
Where every colour is born without sin

Red be a roaring river in my veins
Green be the beat of the heart in the trees
Blue be the pull of the moon on the tide
Let brown be the base of some true love's eyes

Special thanks to , and for being such generous, supportive and safe places to explore these languages and knowings. You are all woven through this essay, and everything else.

I have a folder of saved posts on Instagram called ‘Maps’. It sits between ‘clothes’, ‘hair’ and ‘gluten free bakeries’.

The parameters are as loose as you’d imagine. If it feels like it goes in Maps, it goes in Maps. What does a map feel like? I’ve thought about this a lot, and of course the edges move all the time, but it’s something like;

Does it point to somewhere I don’t know?

Does it point to somewhere I desire but don’t see?

Does it clearly mark the route to something I hold dear?

Is it none of these things but it just feels right in the folder?

I should express that while the questions are sincere, some of the saved posts are absolutely not. I believe this contradiction can coexist very meaningfully. I would go as far as to say the combination is essential. If a future that acknowledges indigenous people as the rightful guardians of their own land doesn’t also involve children sharing streams of consciousness about nap time, I don’t want it. As I type, there are 3119 posts saved in Maps.

“Delayed Gratification has been the publication ‘last to breaking news’ since 2011. I will always buy a second hand copy when I find it in the bargain bin, often meaning I’m a further six months or a year behind. Imagine setting out to report at least three months after the event. Imagine. Imagine waiting for nuance to unfold, repercussions to be felt, the wider context to be known. I breathe more deeply just thinking about it.

Currency, coming from ‘current’. Resources are meant to move. They should flow, carry, inform and nourish things on their way. Cash was never meant to be stacked high. Bread was never meant to be mass produced and binned at the end of the day. Streams, rivers, canals and oceans - Give like those.

‘Mapping’ is an act with roots thick in colonialism. The idea that ground can be scoped, named and drawn is a process of naming yourself as knowing and in ownership of power. Charting, plotting, delineating. It assumes the ground is static. That the document created and the knowledge gained will be relevant two years or ten seconds from now. I’ve heard suggestions for alternative words; constellations, creative cartographies. More than anything, I appreciate the encouragement to shift stance. To adopt a state of unknowing and ephemeral encounter.

Are care-full maps possible? Can a map honour land, speak with it and its people? Can maps exist like weather and weather be read as a map?

“You don’t look thirty six!” It’s four days before my birthday and I’ve reached an age where people younger than me exclaim in response to my age. I assume they do this for one of two reasons; to extend what they think I will think of as a compliment and/or to show they don’t think I’m too old to take part in this conversation. I’m mostly left wondering what thirty six ‘looks like’. What did I think thirty six would look like for myself?

I instinctively spend time with past selves in the run up to a birthday. They’re all in there, just as every person older than me told me they would be. My inner fourteen year old gasps hearing me tell these young women my age. My inner twenty three year old wants to suggest we grab a drink. I hear myself justify the cardigan in my hands as ‘a birthday present to myself’. It’s pure Shetland wool, cream, with toggles and a tassel trim. I can see myself in it at seventy. Another prop for becoming an age?

People write memoirs and fill photo albums and loft spaces with scraps and tat and trinkets. I find lists saving pages in second hand books, keep lists of my own in notebooks with names that I choose with care and don’t expect anyone to learn about. I think keeping the breadcrumbs that have led you to yourself is probably a natural thing to want to do. I think I was always going to gather a list of fragments like these around a birthday - Of course the many shapes of map would lead me here (and there, and somewhere else.) As I write, and publish words known by their own birthday-ing bodies, entering and traversing their forties which now don’t feel far so away for me. Others are doing it - our maps overlapping, desire lines running away from our own pages onto something shared. A bigger piece of paper. The in-built desire to reflect, rummage, archive; I trust it.

If it’s not entangled it’s not my happiness”

- Concluding statement in a series of voice notes with a dear friend who is absolutely right.

As the pains layer to distracting levels, I feel a strong pull towards the gallery. I am heavy, but I grab my coat. Being with art is an anchor - An unknown known amongst chaos. Navigation. I stand in front of a tiny portrait from 1616. The pencil lines are hair thin and the woman’s eye is ready to blink. It’s fragile and timeless and deep as the ocean.

There is so much. More than any lifetime could ever filter, let alone consume. Any library, art gallery, a single line, a single blade of grass - they all confirm there is more than I’ll ever know or need or ask for. What do maps mean in that context? Routes so dense they become a solid weave. Easy to mistake for solid ground. Don’t mistake for solid ground. I fear lies are sold on the premise of solid ground where there is in fact give, and bounce and space, with some teasing. Gentle teasing apart of the strands is an act of conservation, preservation, attention, care. Muchness and care. Muchness, care and delight. They sound like the beginning of some constellation worth dancing amongst.

A man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

- Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

Yes, you are an artist. No you don’t have to check with anyone else. Yes you can introduce yourself as one. No you don’t have to pass an exam to use the word. I know that can be confusing. I’m speaking to an artist who has spent 30 years investing in two skillsets - isn’t it interesting that he only feels like an expert in the one that isn’t art?

I have been listening closely to artists for at least 17 years. But I do remember the point at which there grew a separation between what I felt artists were offering and how they often perceived their own place in the world. I think this was the point I also created a quiet, inner separation between ‘art’ and ‘the art world’ as a way of staying upright and being with what I loved while acknowledging the shit that came with it. Being an artist is like no other job on the planet. And yet I repeatedly meet artists harmed by the lie that it is.

Power has always been afraid of art. Where there is no fear, I carry good doubt about the shape of that power. Art speaks truth in a language ‘The Man’ can’t fathom, so it’s right and obvious that there would be tensions when structures of power commission artists. Art has sometimes sat within power structures - the royal commission, the national exhibition - but I intuit that the modernity project has brought a shift in the honesty around these compromising collaborations. What was once ‘I want four portraits of my family members for this sum of money and you have the skills to make that happen - Do you want the job?’ appears to have morphed into a much more stressed weave of agendas - hidden and not - resulting in complex offers and unspoken bargains. The artist’s agency is diminished and trust in their output withers. In the scarcity landscape created by systems of injustice, the need for the institution to retain power becomes more hidden and pervasive. The perceived need for commissioners to draw their funders’ parameters around the work about to be made is tied to the feeling of needing to stay alive -having a job in six or twelve months, celebrating a milestone birthday as an organisation. And because it matters - we wouldn’t do it if it we didn’t care. The stakes feel impossibly high.

I don’t believe this state of play is the fault of people currently working as artists and arts commissioners. I do believe we can choose how we respond to the truth of it.

In my experience, there are three main reasons a person may end up in an institution or organisation that works with artists:

1. You began as an artist and meandered into full time work in the administration of the art work, more or less purposefully

2. You are a practicing artist and your job in a cultural institution pays the bills in a field that you’re connected to and invested in

3. You were never an artist but you believe in art. You want to support artists and take a role in making art central to civic life

What a team. What ripe ground for priorities to interweave. What amazing skillsets to have operating spaces of imagination. The vision, possibility and potential feels huge. And yet, at the point of quietly separating ‘art’ from ‘the art world’, I later noticed another necessary internal separation between ‘arts workers’ and ‘the institution’. So many good people. So many inherited and invisible barriers.

I note that I’m using words like ‘artist’, ‘organisation’ and ‘institution’ repeatedly. I know for some this will situate them directly in their experience as someone working with public funding streams - for others, their experience may be with commercial galleries or large companies. I acknowledge that the people behind all of these words operate at different scales and with different abilities to respond to the current way of doing things. It’s easy to assume a hierarchy of agency, or proximity to power, and it’s true that I’m most often in scenarios where the artist is craning their neck upwards towards opportunity. An organisation can be a charity with a ten year record of delivering public art projects; it can also look like a group of artists who choose to be more or less formally constituted. The artist can be someone making work at their kitchen table after the children go to bed, or they can be a very wealthy person with a team of studio workers and huge influence over the museum. I’ve already acknowledged that one person might carry several of these job titles or identities. It’s a complex weave and I could write separately about the wider village of the arts; who lives where and how they interact. That’s not today’s point. For now, I want to focus on cultural change in the way art is held. Regardless of organisational scale or individual significance, I don’t think the opportunities and barriers are always where we think they are. We do have access to choices, wherever we sit in the ecology.

The art world operates on cash as currency. Currency from ‘current’; to flow. But does it flow as it can and should? As it stands, financial resource for artworks is filtered through layers of justification;

What will you make?

Why are you making it?

How much does it cost?

Could it be cheaper?

How many people will be impacted?

Could it be more?

How many of them are Black/Disabled/‘deprived’?

Could it be more?

When will it be finished?

Here’s one version of events: The organisation justifies their plans to the central funding body, the artist justifies their plans to the organisation, everyone competes to be the most justified and feels the weight of their promises if they’re ‘lucky’ enough to get the commission. Most often, the brunt lands at the least resourced end of the game. It’s easy to forget the cupboards full of resources bigger and more powerful than cash when they are not affirmed as valuable here. Good people dreaming of good things do their best to reclaim what imaginative ground they can and box-off what ‘needs to be done’ to make it happen - Another internal separation of ‘what feels right and true’ and ‘the hoops that need to be jumped through’. Administration and justification of the new and beautiful thing lingers as a shadow in the room as creation occurs. The work requires two languages; the language of embodied experience and the language of the art world; Or, increasingly, the languages of every world, sector, problem and hope that is hanging on this new thing. The artist wonders why they feel stressed when there’s been talk of freedom and support through a veil of worries about staying afloat, staying resourced and staying relevant. Despite every best intention from the commissioner who cares, these agendas are passed on to the artist by osmosis. The commission is done, everyone is exhausted, something is missing and everyone feels it.

Applying the trajectories of capitalist progress narratives limits the work in more ways than I can name. In fact it doesn’t simply limit it, it changes its nature at a cellular level. It becomes something else - business, transaction, ‘making do’. Art is slow. Plastering over political failings is urgent. Whether the impetus is wealth gain or a perceived sense of social ‘progress’, how dare the crumbling world transfer its guilt and uncertainty onto hands that intuit and brains that craft their knowing without words. Parameters defined by fear drive panic, blinkered determination, competition and disconnected production. Value becomes synonymous with how many shows you’ve been approached for this year and how many years the building has been opening its doors, whatever the cost. The bodies become tough and tense. What flows from this state? Nothing good, as far as I can imagine.

In the brief brushstroke that takes a split second, nothing becomes something. In the briefest gesture there are years and lifetimes of care, attention and intention. All the choices that came before it. Art unfolds, it spreads, it permeates. It creates life and merges life that already exists. Practices swallow one another and form clear pools to bathe in difference. An artist in flow is soft and strong, unselfconscious, tested, tenacious, cantankerous, truthful; a body of contradictions and clarity. Permission and acknowledgement of this expertise encourages reflection and intuition to work together. The artist is allowed to know themselves. The artist makes beautiful and necessary things from this knowing.

This permission, acceptance and encouragement is central to artist-led ecologies. I see artists creating spaces of rest and relief from the perceived demands and expectations of the worlds that ask them to do art ‘properly’; ‘professionally’. It’s the hour at the end of a day spent taking down an exhibition. The breath between. There is always laughing, there are always too many ideas, something always gets made - even just from beer mats or crisp packets. There’s dreaming and scheming about what could be made, what might be made alongside, what might happen in the cracks between us. This includes artists who work in organisations. This includes comrades and supporters. The frustrations and alternatives are sketched in the pub; after the workshop or over coffee. These moments are made by and for those who became involved in the arts for these conversations. For this way of being. Not for the unexpected bureaucracy. This is not about running away and hiding from people - from each other - but from ideologies and pervasive cultures of power. I get such energy from these spaces, but they feel like touching a world you can’t live in. What would it take to collapse the walls between worlds?

As I see it, survival in the present requires multiple separations; Art and art world, art worker and institution, what feels good and what must be done. I’m sure there are more. Choices in the arts revolve around the pay-off; is this worth it? Will it work if this is like this and that does that? It takes energy to hold these postures apart. On top of this we are obliged to measure our interactions by the standards of an amorphous other - The spectors of ‘success’, ‘progress’ and ‘properness’. All this encourages attention and obsession in the wrong places. Art is not inherently judgemental - Judgement is applied as part of ‘the way it’s done’.

I have written with three particular artists in mind. I imagine what they might be thinking if they’ve made it this far. Does this letting go mean we can’t be critical? That we must dampen our interest, investment and care for being involved with galleries, curators, shows or sales? No. We should be able to care about these things as deeply as we like. There can and should be an ecology rich enough to hold choice. We can discuss and clarify and re-work the way it works if we want to. We can be very public in our making; we can also bury ourselves away and make for joy and curiosity if that is our necessity. We can charge for our craft, or give it away freely. We can obsessively revel in the work of others or we can survey the land from time to time, gently noting our context. What’s vitally important to me is that the artist knows who they are and is aware of what that means in the world. An industry, landscape or organised approach to art that leaves the artist unsure of their value, or basing their value on a single route to the ‘top’, is not one that is working for anyone.

Commissioning is a broad term meaning to officially authorize, order, or put something into service, but it most commonly refers to either the strategic process of planning and buying public services (like NHS healthcare or social care) to meet needs, or the technical process in construction/engineering of testing complex systems (HVAC, electrical) before handover to ensure they work as designed. In essence, it’s about defining requirements, securing services/equipment, verifying functionality, and ensuring optimal performance for a desired outcome.

I don’t have an alternative mapped out ready to suggest, and it would feel wrong if I did. Art is iterative, developmental, responsive and informed. Aiming towards a detached, imagined version of the industry ‘made good’ feels as harmful as upholding the present. It only repeats the progress myth and discounts the treasure that hasn’t been uncovered yet. Both art and futures are made in small behaviours, committed choices and intentional experiments. I don’t have a destination in mind, but I do see the experiments already happening and I have some intuitions about small places worth investment.

The revolution will not be commissioned. Not like this, anyway. The revolution will be felt, ushered, listened for. It will be unassumed, unassuming and generous. More generous than is comfortable. The revolution will be lived, shared, made between us. It exists in how we entangle ourselves and how we recognise ourselves as intertwined. It exists in the tone and accessibility of processes. The small choices we make to protect one another’s integrity. Trusting the artists’ autonomy. The small, brave ‘no’ to the entity one step up in the food chain. No, we won’t promise to deliver five times more than our capacity. No, that isn’t what artists need - let’s try it this way. No, this contract doesn’t acknowledge all I need it to - can we look again together? In time, the food chain will dissolve. In time, we’ll marvel that there was ever a food chain - we just can’t know how that will look without that first brave ‘no’. The revolution exists in making space for kindness, even though that takes thirty more seconds or twenty more minutes. It exists in promising less and valuing more. It exists in being glad we’re here, rather than separating languages in order to stay. It exists in steadfastly prioritising relationships knowing the cost is too great if we don’t. In making art, rather than a machine to produce something that looks a bit like it.

1. Listen - It’s loving

It’s the first way you can love. Your surroundings are turning out their pockets, spilling their treasure. Be alive enough to hear it.

Gossip has saved lives. For centuries the rumour has carried value. Whispers ride winds and become myth; become story. New words fall from air and into regular mouth use, into written use, into history books. Truth and falsity become meandering terms. They define nothing and mean everything. Who knows? Who cares? What is truth anyway? Who decides? This? It’s just how we’ve always done it.

Beautiful, invisible work

2. Wonder/Wander

Meander. So much gets missed on the straight road from past to progress. Let the wind take the ship. Movement is making.

I’ve been asked to listen as work many times before, but it’s never been the job description on the contract. It’s like the question isn’t nameable somehow - Can you listen to/for/into this, please? Yes. Yes I can. I’d love to.

A mutual friend threw my name in the mix and I’m grateful. The golden moments on my CV all came directly out of relationships. It makes sense. Plant life tangles below ground and occasional flowers pop above the soil. From good roots grows good trouble.

A creature of my place

3. Today, you are a creature of this place.

With me. With the sea. With us. With yourself.

I care what happens over there and sometimes that feeling has nowhere to live. There is no research to support the presence of the caring stranger. There is plenty of experience to suggest the parachute project brings more harm than good. Data sings the praises of the five minute neighbourhood and hyperlocal living. What are the consequences of me listening and leaving? I consider this a lot.

Welcome. All parts.

6. You are joining in the middle

This is the middle of many 100 year plans. It is not the beginning. You will not provide the end. The deadlines are unclear - What freedom.

Stakeholder.

When a tree is felled, the weight of the body is proportionate to the number of people willing to take a share in the load of moving it. More hands make light work. More hearts highlight the possible onward pathways. Some move the tree, some turn it into firewood, some whittle spoons and dream up sculptures, some tell about it. All are stakeholders.

I recently learned from a palm reader that my head and heart lines are completely intertwined. Forgive me for not knowing how to separate them.

Land; verb and noun

8. Dance and sing while you make sense of it

Re-making, re-imagining, re-pairing, re-membering - Music and food and taking your thoughts for a walk all help. Tenfold with a friend.

I once went to Italy and ate a perfect, white peach. Soft sunset skin, juice escaping down my chin. Sweet, fibrous, pulled clean from the stone with my teeth. I held the stone in my palm, a souvenir of what had just happened. Proof it happened. I still have that stone.

A permanent farm here now

10. You are community

Community is not a destination. You can’t drive there or order a slice to your door. No one can make it for you or hand theirs over. Even if they could, I hope they wouldn’t. It’s here - You and him and them and us. We are it.

About the work:

Lores of the LeftCoast is a work developed in response to The Land Beneath Our Feet Symposium hosted by Leftcoast in April 2025.

Laws are created to govern shared space and enforce power. They decide who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Lores are something else. They are the complex stories we create between ourselves, whispered down generations and across geographies. Lore is knowledge of how we have lived and dreams of how we might live in the future. It needs a community to exist.

On 24 April 2025, LeftCoast invited friends, colleagues and neighbours to come together to consider questions of collaboration, creative action and environmental responsibility. They invited artist, Lydia Catterall, to attend the event as a ‘listener’. This work has emerged from what she overheard.

“I’m glad your life is so beautiful.” Sarah begins her reply. I flush with embarrassment. I worry I’ve been misunderstood. I’ve forgotten myself and casually used language in a room that doesn’t necessarily talk Art. Perhaps they’re picturing an off grid commune, wall-size canvases and £1 dinners for 10 people. There isn’t time for me to qualify or contextualise my question, but I spend the following days curious about what was and wasn’t said. What I did and didn’t mean. What is and isn’t being talked about and why.

There’s a graveyard next to the M621 between IKEA and Leeds. I am never less surprised that it’s there or that I have feelings about it. As the city skyline emerges on the horizon, a modern tetris of skyscrapers and shiny metal, the road flies over suburban housing estates and duplicate play parks. I always think of the planning meeting where someone suggested that the odd-shaped patch left over after all this development should house the remains of beloved ancestors. I can only picture something akin to a game of battleships. I don’t know what other parameters would make it make sense.

A friend sends me a post on Instagram.

Immediately, this scene makes sense to my bones. No notes.

International Artist Day is celebrated annually on October 25th to honour artists and their contributions to society. Founded by Canadian artist Chris MacClure, the date was chosen to coincide with the birthday of famed artist Pablo Picasso. The day is meant to raise awareness about the value of art and to encourage people to support artists and creativity.

I feel gaslit by everything but trees and artists. Thank god I feel safe in the hands of both.

What a strange state of affairs to look around and ask how artists ‘fit into the plan’. In the wider progressive project, what can artists do for us? Like looking at a field of wild horses and asking ‘do you think they could do something for the landscape?’

The landscape is a wilderness of its own design; self sufficiently roaming, intertwined with itself, carrying wisdom in its roots. The horses are wild too, but wild and warm. Hot, breathing, bodies traversing; encountering. In conversation with and yet all of themselves. This is how it is for artist.

The artist Katherina Radeva has spent months crafting a new banner:

ART SAVES MY LIFE EVERY DAY

I adore Samhain in principle. The sense of meeting the thinnest part of the year, of composting what’s passed and welcoming darkness and rest. These things are easy to feel wrapped up in; cosied by. In practice, I am challenged. It’s the season-shift that shunts my body most profoundly. From warm bones into a dry, creak. Pain and fatigue increase. Blood works harder to reach extremities, keeping them awake. I don’t think this is purely an illness experience. Less sunlight, drier air, cooler atmosphere - All living things note these changes. With the arrival of the 5pm night also comes less comfortable autonomy, less visibility. Despite the golden, sideways light and miraculous colours, I admit I can find this season harder to welcome.

Three years ago, my friend Lucy Wright invented a new folk practice. All traditions must start somewhere. May Day gives opportunity to dance the sun up but there was no point at which it was danced down again - Nothing can go up and up and up forever. So Lucy invited a dance for the sun’s descent. Dusking. Hundreds took this offering into their calendar immediately. Some gap was offered shape. A container. A container with mailable edges, rather than rules for entry. Marginal, peripheral and unexpected participation welcome on 31st October, 4.33pm.

I have family staying, but take a solo walk around midday. There’s mist on the river, wagtails in the reeds and moisture in the air. I stand, stare and sway. I’m with the season and all it brings. I’m grateful for the container.

Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K Le Guin 1986

I’ve had lots of time with artists this week and I can feel it. It’s a posture thing. Theirs, then mine because of theirs. I can feel an artist surveying the land (sky, universe) as we chat. The points of reference are outside - beyond. They’re aware they’re in bodies. They intuitively seek joy. Marrow softens. Open chest. Deep breaths. Home.

My body is an art.

I am one of 50 captured by visual artist, and precious friend, Emma Bentley-Fox for a new exhibition aiming to reflect the breadth and depth of disabled resistance. Emma travelled to all corners of West Yorkshire to photograph disabled and chronically ill creatives along with a sign. A message. To our government; to the ‘outside world’; to each other.

In the context of everything that’s happening, of all the things I could’ve said, why did I write this?

Well.

Most and many of the other 49 sentiments speak for me too. I am also worried. I am also furious. I too am calling for compassion, understanding, inclusion and basic human care. This collection of signs works because we’re all different, and yet.

I admitted to Emma that the right words for my cardboard weren’t rushing to mind. I was walking through fog that day, intermittently but enough to feel frustrated at my lack of access to words right when I needed it. We chatted over tea about what might need to be said. By me. That day.

Because a chronically ill body moves like a tide and changes like weather. To be in touch with its ebb and flow is to have an acute sense of what’s right or wrong, possible or more challenging, in most moments. The right thing to be saying, doing or scoping washes up on the shore and I pick up the shell. Hold it in my palm. Sometimes I study it. Sometimes I slip it into a bag of precious things to study another time. Emma and I talk about our experiences of illness. When did it happen? How suddenly? When did the first flickers of acceptance arrive? What does it look like when we fight it? My fog doesn’t lift, but it circles around my ankles and the backs of my eyes, then settles, like an old and loyal dog by a fire. The three of us settle together. We can settle together because Emma ‘gets it’. We are different, and yet.

To negotiate the world in a disabled body is to live artfully. It’s to problem solve, imagine what does not yet exist and make it so. To craft space together is to perform everyday miracles. I once spent two days in a room designed in response to more than forty access riders and it was brilliant. Caring for your body is not too much effort. To shape this space by the curve of our needs is not ‘going out of our way’, it’s a way worth going. For everybody. No one is made poorer by a disabled led space. The relief of the unspoken knowns - Gah. Please don’t misunderstand me; I am not describing faultless utopia. We are human beings - these spaces are not perfect - but that’s why they’re perfect. They are knowingly shaped by fleshiness. By the assumption that temperature fluctuates and appetites shift. By the assumption that ‘on foot’ is not the only or best means of travel. Imagine being in a room that already assumes you will get tired, you will be excited, that you are smart and knowledgeable and in need of support. A baseline of gratitude for your presence; resources are finite, thank you for choosing to spend them here. Does a non-disabled body have different parameters? Of course not. The edges may have different coordinates, but it remains true that all bodies have limits, gifts, challenges and best conditions for their flourishing. I just prefer being in spaces that acknowledge these truths.

Disabled people are the world’s largest minority. Our bodies are inherently political. The quiet shadow of opportunity to live differently, more equitably, runs parallel to the everyday bin fire. The world’s best kept secret in plain sight. I could write, say, scream thousands of words about how purposefully cruel and objectively deathly the UK government’s decisions are. I could plainly share the various points in history when disabled bodies were considered a hindrance. Or I can point steadfastly to one of the most beautiful things I’ve known. Interconnected, interdependent, deeply listening, inherently curious, ‘fuck it let’s try’ ways of living. Resistance. Creation - between bodies that work with, through and beyond one another. Something it’s not possible to take away.

Rights Cuts Action: The creativity of disabled resistance is open at Shape Arts in High Wycombe from Monday 6 October until Wednesday 5 November 2025 featuring artists Emma Bentley Fox, Anna Berry, Elora Kadir, Fae Kilburn, Vince Laws, Zoe Milner, Guy Morris, Déa Neile-Hopton, Kristin Rawcliffe, Ivan Riches, Benedict Robinson, and Kim Waine-Thomas.

We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday
We like who we like, we hate who we hate
But we're also easily swayed

- Angry Mob, Kaiser Chiefs released 2007

Hide your horses, hold your tongue

Hang the rich and spare the young

Who drain the spirits from the jars

Hop the fences, steal the cars

Run on fumes and from the north

And burn for us right through the fall

- The Fall, Lisa Hannigan

The season for figs is short. I light up seeing a box of four on the shelf - £2, or £1 for members. I’m a ‘member’ of three supermarkets. It’s a free card that gets you discounts. I became a member after ‘popping in for a bottle of milk’ became a semi-regular occurrence, and now a seeming commitment to this supermarket gets me four figs for £1. I feel strange about the game as my teeth sink in. I’m sure it affects the taste. The fruit is gone in three, squashy, delicious bites and I’m left holding only the very tip of the woody stalk. I resist the instinct to drop it, waiting to find earth for it to meet. I don’t see any. I really search. I don’t find any. A sudden sensation of slow claustrophobia encroaches and I have to look to the sky to feel like there’s enough air.

Around turning twelve, I responded to a poster appealing to young people in my town. Do you want to have a say where you live? Want to be more involved? With hindsight, I have no idea what made me ask to go. I can’t remember that choice. I don’t remember the night before or the journey there, I just remember walking into a community hall with huge, round tables, tons of flip chart paper and being welcomed by a woman with the cheekiest smile I’ve ever seen on an adult face. The smile belonged to Clare Cope - Senior Youth Worker and lead on the Voice and Influence Project. I didn’t know it yet but, by the end of this day, I would be my hometown’s first representative for UK Youth Parliament. I’d end up spending two, three, four nights a week at the youth centre, council chambers or a community centre in one borough or another, leading sessions, training up, listening in. My education outside education.

“Bollocks.” Clare said, matter of factly. “We can do anything.” She was equally matter of fact. And her eyes twinkled in a way that made me believe her wholeheartedly. It’s two years later, I’m fourteen and the BNP are making a claim to run our local council. The British National Party; a political group quickly gaining ground for their protect ‘British values’ - protect white, English, British values - rhetoric. The chances of them doing it are looking high. A group of us have gathered and we’ve told Clare we’re scared because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything we can do. She tells us we are the experts of our own experience and there’s nothing they can tell us about the lives we want for ourselves. She asks if we have questions, desires to act or things we’d like to learn. We’re aware that the BNP are set to hold their annual general meeting just down the road. I later learn they’ve been holding it there for years, receiving a loyalty discount on the room for coming back and back. We agree we want to march alongside Unite Against Fascism and our youth workers come with us.

There aren’t good adjectives for describing the moment you meet someone you wish didn’t exist. I’d studied the BNP, learning their history, motives, movements, successes and weak spots. And here I was, almost looking the party’s leader in the eye. Griffin had come to meet us outside the pub that held his colleagues. He puffed up his chest and moved towards the crowd. It’s a long time ago and my memory of the general scene is hazy. The crowd felt significant - We made an impression and a hefty noise. But my memory of his face is clear as day. He spotted young people in the crowd and didn’t alter his stance in the slightest. We were at the front. He looked right us and sneered. He said something about wasting our time on this, rather than being at home playing computer games and hanging out in parks. He spat on the ground not far from my feet. This was a moment I understood if fascists could behave like this with fourteen year olds, then having countering views was only going to feel more dangerous as we got older. The police arrived not long after and he immediately smiled. Dangerous.

I joined a small cohort to train as a peer educator in anti fascism. A partnership between our youth service and the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I learned that my birthday - 27 January - also marks the liberation of Auschwitz and so, in many places, is a day of Holocaust remembrance. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d spend my eighteenth birthday offering opening words for the first remembrance event in my town after spending months helping to pull it together. We visit Auschwitz. Feel its ghostly stillness and cold. Walk through rooms of hair and shoes and glasses and cried. We watch films about Rwanda. Write to survivors of genocide. Spend time with the discrimination pit (also known as the seven stages of genocide) and lose our words realising how far things had already gotten. This was in 2005. We created sessions to deliver to people our own age in youth centres and community halls - This is why we should care, this is why it’s not all in the past, this is how you can make less space for it on your bus, on your street, in your home. The conversations were complex. Lots of young people had inherited fear, bad stats and casual racism. Lots of them listened, asked good questions and we did the same in return. It felt like progress.

The BNP didn’t win power. I don’t claim it was down to our workshops. Our attendees weren’t old enough to vote anyway. But it did feel like a moment. A movement. Hearts and minds were changed. Alternatives were offered. It didn’t stay good forever. It won’t always be good. But I choose not to forget the time something happened. After so many marches together, Unite Against Fascism organised a concert. I remember jumping, yelling chants along with the crowd, feeling pride, community and connection. It’s a memory I return to. Too many have never felt that.

“Have you heard of Radiohead? I think they’re good.” Boy has independently discovered Radiohead. He’s found the Artic Monkeys too. I tell him that band are from my hometown and I used to see the lead singer at the local bowling alley. I realise I suddenly sound like an adult with stories that happened twenty years ago. I suppose it’s because I am. I’m catching up with an old friend and we’re lamenting the state of the arts. She’s recently completed a long period of research that gives facts and data to many artists’ intuitions about just how grave the picture is, and she’s telling me it’s likely the last research she’ll do. I tell her I’m continually reminded of just how much knowledge exists - How many billions of books, papers, accounts and artefacts are available to tell us all we need to know about everything that has happened and will likely happen again. True, she agrees, but there is no collective memory beyond a generation. It’s a thought my head has considered before, but it lands in my gut hearing it today. Storytelling is essential - vital - in these times, no doubt. But collective experience, intergenerational collective experience, experience and memory that live communally in our individual and collective bodies - This. How to… this?

When did cities become devoid of life? I know for some the answer is ‘always’. For me, the city has always had a full half of my heart - Handmade ecosystems with hidden corners, changing temperatures and a common breath. A site of encounter, possibility. Perhaps the scale of infrastructure and law inherently creates more cracks to slip through, edges to inhabit and expectations to flip. I have always found artists in cities. I see a city’s breakage and decay and I’m not afraid of it. It’s the polished frontages that make me truly scared. The rising water, the high bar, that pushes out independent thought and demands homogenous presentation. No place to drop the stalks of fruit. The room looks different after battle. I live between two cities for now and know that the frayed edges are the only places I feel real truthfulness and hope. Spaces where wildness can grow, despite fair reason to feel disenchanted.

Half the time, I live near a very park-ish park. A sort of ‘super park’, actually. I say this because all of its uses are always fully in use. The playground is always cacophonous, the scrubland full of bike tricks and learners, the path weaving walkers, roller bladers and buggies through the trees. Someone is always skimming stones in the river. Every bench is hosting a conversation. But I think I love this park most for its picnic culture. I love picnics. And this park goes big on outdoor eating; Long tables, hot plates, tablecloths, groups of 50 or more gathering to share food and news. A stack of pizza boxes for a spontaneous al fresco meal, or a highly curated birthday, christening or wedding celebration with colour themed ribbons and bows. In the summer, you can’t see the grass for blankets, cushions and platters. It smells amazing. It looks amazing.

It shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s always wild to witness the weather making very little difference to this scenario. The slimmest window of clear sky is enough of a signal to eat in the park. Sit in the park. Meet in the park. A breeze just means more layers. Gazebos and tents have been known. But sometimes it pours.

It had been raining all afternoon, so who knows when the gathering had felt good about beginning, but the food was hot and steaming by the time I was walking by. A break in the downpour had people piling their plates with rice and stew. Half the group were dressed in white with colourful, geometric stitched pattern around each neckline. Their bodies moved gracefully; an outstretched arm to offer a bread roll became choreography. Smiles too big for their faces. The scene landed in between a ballet, leaf cutter ants doing their day and the most fleshy human behaviour you might encounter.

I was three paths away when thunder rumbled and the clouds broke again. I didn’t see the impact but they crossed my mind. That’s a lot to clear away in the rain, I thought.

But on my way home, rivers running off my rain mac, I found the whole lot eating and laughing and chatting, just in a new configuration. A small group had run for the bandstand and were now having dance battles, telling jokes and generally flouncing from their high up place in the storm. The rest of the crowd had split and taken shelter under neighbouring oak trees. Some were locked into conversation with the person next to them. Some were conversing across the shelters, making for hilarious open air exchanges on politics: family and international. The temporary architecture made it easy for people to join and leave the flow at will. Spaghetti junction for gossip. Occasionally, someone would take flight from one covering, heading to another laden with food. Back from bandstand to Oak, ladles of rice lighter. The scene landed somewhere in between a ballet, leaf cutter ants doing their day and the most fleshy human behaviour you might encounter. The gathering continued, changed but not worse.

As we were becoming friends, my now partner was writing an album that remains one of my favourites. I first listened to the sound file on a long train journey, and both grinned and crumpled when I heard that some of our conversations had found their way into the lyrics. What might revolutions look like? What are the shapes of beautiful futures? Free horses. Welcome strangers. Occupied bandstands. In hindsight these were the early seeds of the workI I’m most actively engaged in right now - noting the many tiny scenes that contribute to ending some epochs and birthing others. Sometimes the radical act is not going home when it begins to rain. I think the end of all that’s limiting comes closer when you keep ladling rice. I suspect ideas shared between oak trees are more likely to spell the death of The Man than those shared by email. Something about improvising in the gaps, wearing your best dress in the storm, occupying bandstands. Something about noting it while it’s happening.

Earlier this week I spent a few minutes really, heartily belly-laughing at a video fed to me by an algorithm that claims to have nailed my sense of humour. On this occasion, it had. A group of bunnies had seemingly been caught on a household security camera, merrily discovering the garden trampoline. Every scrap of delight you’re picturing is accurate. The video went viral - Thousands laughed along too. Then it was revealed to be Ai generated. And this time, I was shocked.

Everything and nothing has changed in the last three years. In January 2022, when I feverishly scribbled the words you can read below, the Ai cloud was colouring the air but hadn’t yet gathered at the end of our noses. It still, at that time, sat in the realms of business and the super rich, with the threat that it may one day reach us more widely. Questions about what it would look like, what roles it would perform, were at the front of so many minds - especially in the context of a thinly stretched job market, failing welfare system and amidst a global health crisis.

My day had begun early and I had glanced at my phone before anything was properly in gear. Passively, I saw a post sent to me by a friend: A text work, hastily painted by the artist Babak Ganjei. It said:

WHEN THE

ROBOTS

STEAL ALL

THE JOBS

IT WON’T FEEL

SO STUPID

TO HAVE

DEDICATED

LIFE AS AN

ARTIST

I wasn’t aware of carrying the words or their impact around all day, but a few minutes before midnight I grabbed a notebook. I became the artist cliche. I shared what fell out, but only with a small group of supporters sat behind a paywall, sheepish somehow. Sharing it then, I said;

I could prune and preen, but that didn’t feel right for this. This supported space was always about sharing snapshots of the studio tabletop; clay barely leather-hard and paint only just touch-dry. This is some of that.

I’ve spent several days at work since writing this, wondering whether the robots are already coming for my job. Or, as they come for all the jobs, my job is deemed not-a-job-enough to have flown under the radar. Pointing out wonder, cultivating empathy, making space for creative re-imagination: Sometimes my working day already looks like the handover.

I work as an artist in lots of different environments - Community spaces, art spaces, as a commissioner, as a maker. The common thread? Relationships. Delicious, spiky, unknowable, brilliant, mind boggling, totally essential relationship. I value human body intelligence - Conscious, unconscious, felt and unseen. I’m dancing with it all day and grateful for it all the time. I remember reading Ganjei’s words and thinking ‘robots wouldn’t dance.’

I had no intention of sharing this writing again, but then the British Prime Minister issued a statement concerning the lives of a dying population without flinching. And I remembered that robots come in many forms. Of course, this isn’t new. I’m not breaking any ground by suggesting that our politicians don’t appear to be the most deeply feeling of public figures. I’m not breaking any ground by telling you that infuriates me so regularly I have to keep a check on myself. It’s not a new truth, but it does feel particular. The timing, the context; the weave is thick and clicks in the cloth protrude obviously. The fabric is malfunctioning. The body intelligence is broken.

So here’s a midnight ramble from three and a half years ago, written in a moment of wondering, truly, if a robot could do my job. Tell me if the machines and the men in power could do yours.

When Robots Come For My Job

When robots come for my job

I’ll ask them how they take their tea

Because to do my job

They’ll need to have a preference

And care to know the other person’s.

•

When robots come for my job

The handover will begin with a walk.

We’ll get on our hands and knees and marvel at grass being made up of so many individual leaves

Even though it looks and feels like a carpet.

We’ll have a picnic and climb a tree and discuss what it is to feel joy in the tips of your ears.

•

When robots come for my job

I’ll wear a loud and distracting outfit while I explain all the cycles;

The moon, a womb,

bicycles, the four seasons,

Spirographs, cortisol,

carousels.

•

When robots come for my job

We’ll listen.

To the wind through branches

To the child screaming blue murder

To the bird and the bar worker

The builder and the market seller.

We’ll pick out tunes and rhythms

And celebrations and blues.

We’ll give what we hear a colour and a shape

And put shapes next to each other to see how they fly.

We’ll consider the concept of flying

Without leaving ground.

•

When robots come for my job

I’ll check their hands are warm.

If they’re not

I’ll have to hope it’s because their heart is instead.

•

When robots come for my job

I’ll check they have a heart.

I’ll check they have heart.

•

When robots come for my job

I’ll make a joke

And hope it blows their circuitry

Or they’ll get bored

And fuck off

Or admit

It’s not their work to do

Before the end of my contract

And the start of theirs.

In February I alluded to my world being full of words. Two weeks ago I reflected that the words aren’t working. Somehow, I am dancing amongst these clashing truths.

Vanessa Machado de Oliviera offered a frame that’s stayed with me ever since picking up her book, ‘Hospicing Modernity’, back in the thick of a world health crisis.

If the primary orienting project of modernity/coloniality is to control and engineer reality through objective unequivocal knowing, this process can only happen through fixed categories of meaning. I refer to this as ‘wording the world’

Worlding stories are not focussed on the aesthetic of perfect form, but on the integration of form and movement. They are not supposed to be ‘thought about’, but thought, felt and danced with and through. They play with the ambivalence and dynamic force of meaning. In this sense, meaning will change as a worlding story lands deeper into the body, a story will have many layers of changing meaning, and some layers will only reveal themselves when the story arrives.

Where possible, I want my words to be part of an undoing - to offer more questions and loose threads than statements or proclamations. Can we queer our understandings and disrupt our certainties? Everything I self initiate aims to be a small part of that project. But, occasionally, I’m employed to deal with information that feels counter to that act of ‘worlding’ - the data, statistics and outcomes of relationship. This might look like a percentage, a timeline or a proclamation stated by someone else and reported by me. Often, the commissioner or funder or other member of the food chain is concerned with wording - This is, after all, how knowledge is created, power is gained and future certainty of income is preserved. I am glad, through a combination of intentional and trusting relationships, that I increasingly find myself in a position of being able to bring some rebellion to these spaces. Whether it’s in the words that are published, or the words that are spoken in the conversations I’m hosting, there is worlding. Bodies are at stake. Alternatives are not ‘thought about’ but created and felt in real time. And then I try and write a report that says so in a way the word-ers might feel.

Some of the words that were filling my working Spring have been making their way into the public conversation and I’d like to share them with you. They take the form of resources, case studies and templates - formats that have been repeated and distributed a billion times over. I hope you’ll find nuggets of something new here. Since they were written, the landscape of British politics and attitudes towards disabled people have become infinitely more hostile. If it’s a surprise to you that we’ve ended up here, I encourage you to take a look through history - Dabble in the disability social justice movement and consider how previous fascist movements have further oppressed marginalised people. None of what we are seeing unfold is new or accidental. Words are one of the tools I have in my armoury - The pen is a precious sword.

Disabled bodies inherently queer the modernity world view. A quarter of the UK working population identifies as disabled - That’s nearly 17 million people. This percentage leaps to nearly 40% when we include long term conditions and chronic illnesses. And this refers to the working population - The numbers rise again when we acknowledge the changes many of our elders experience as they age. (Aging which has been afforded by medical research, but the national conversation now considers an inconvenience…) The need to gather our tools for the push back is pressing. Lives, as well as livelihoods, are at risk.

So let me share some windows. Over the last year, I’ve worked closely with leading disability arts commissioners, Unlimited. I’ve been part of three pieces of work, and want to share some new resources for you to take into your contexts. Use them like Trojan horses, maps and conversation starters. They’re wildly practical - Live them, skew them. Make them real! Disabled friends - I hope you might also use them instead of spoons you don’t have.

Over 2024/5, I led a programme that aims to increase accessibility for disabled artists and audiences in cultural spaces and programmes across West Yorkshire. Here are 11 case studies detailing the change it supported for a handful arts organisations, as well as approaching topics like ‘creating connections via access’ and why putting disabled people at the forefront of decisions that affect disabled people makes sense. I particularly want to draw attention to ‘I’d love to do more about access, but…’: based on conversations with well intentioned and under resourced folks.

Small capital grants made up part of the programme, and the learning went into two, new resources:

• A shopping list for access when the budget is small

• A venue access checklist, to support thinking through your own space or a space you plan to hire

This led to further commissions; co-leading research into the realities for disabled-led, regularly funded organisations in the North of England, commissioned by Arts Council England. (Details on how to request the whole report are at the end of the article)

And interviewing ten disabled artists who have worked internationally about their experiences of doing so. Here’s one I particularly enjoyed pulling together, but there are nine more where that came from - just filter the blog section by ‘International’ and you’ll find them.

Not my work, but I also want to highlight the recently updated access rider resource, edited by my brilliant pal, Emma Bentley-Fox. They did such a good job, it even made me write my first rider…

I have always maintained that this is a ‘newsletter’ - Sometimes the ‘news’ is the way the light struck a particular blade of grass, other times its a report reflecting what your belly feels to be true. All are tools for the unfolding revolution, I think. I hope you’ll throw them around liberally wherever you can.

Thanks to the impeccable taste and generosity of , I’ve been reading ‘The Dragonfly is the Messiah’ by farmer and philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka. It’s a perfect book. In it, the writer has a profoundly felt and simply explained encounter with the land. He is floored by it, made newly aware of his creatureliness. He runs to tell people about his encounter, knowing the power of story to change hearts and minds. Maybe just a few others will feel more inclined to live with the earth differently. But every time he tells it, he feels further from the experience. The embodied truth of it wanes a little. He feels increasingly as if he is pointing at an object and describing its size and edges. The more he retreats, the more he is asked to tell the story. He decides he must stop describing and live the thing, moving out toward a field-filled and human-sparse existence on the edges. These paragraphs make up a very small part of a very small book, but I’ve read them over and over and with different feelings every time.

In April, I scooped a copy of Dark Mountain’s manifesto into my rucksack. I walked it up a hill and back down again, before landing in my hostel dorm to read it. This updated edition includes an introduction penned by founder and friend, . ‘The literary tools inherited from the recent past’ he reflects ‘seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading.’ My heart got stuck on the line, so I walked six miles with it before landing in a book shop and buying two, very strange texts. I opened the first of them by a brook and read the first page aloud - the water helps tell it. (Dougald will be delighted to have further enabled my book-buying problem.) Over the subsequent months, I’ve heard a cackle in the silences; especially in my moments of surveying the land for ‘exactly the right word’. Ha! Lately I’ve been writing on the premise that the right words don’t exist and the ways of speaking words are limited in ways I don’t know yet. It’s been odd and freeing and strange and spacious. I’m writing a lot, and it just gets weirder. Maybe that’s what needs to happen? I imagine the emergence of new languages could only sound strange. Especially given the weirdness they’re tasked with describing.

I think it’s probably helpful to carry the assumption that something is lost in telling the story, and that the words for telling it aren’t right anyway. I wonder how many iterations and tweaks Masanobu made before intuiting that words weren’t working this time. I wonder how the story lived with him from then. I wonder how it felt in his system. After many re-readings I’m left with understanding tinged with sadness. I know the feeling of moving further away from something that feels precious and close by naming it. I often wonder what to do with that. But I also want to hope there can be ground between losing what’s special and needing to isolate yourself to protect it - a space to allow the experience to live brightly in one body and glow as a thread woven through community. Could his encounter have been his quiet superpower? A reservoir thoughts, skills and joy to offer into a rich communal life? I trust Masanobu - implicitly by the end of the book - but it’s true that I’m left with dual feelings about his story: both a disappointment at magic leading him into solitude and a delight that the story exists in its rightful shape.

One of the most common questions I hear from artists is ‘But does it make sense? I don’t know how to describe it a in way that makes sense.’ Within the story, I hear a thread of ‘this work is beyond words’ or ‘there isn’t language for this.’ That’s why you made it, I often think. ‘How can I connect with others? How do I ask someone to stay here a while?’, they wonder. And with it a huge and stressful dose of ‘How do I ask people to fund this?’. Invariably, I’ll ask how the project feels - What shapes, colours, textures or sounds make it up? Where does it live? Who does it affect? How? Why? There are no right or wrong answers. I’m just listening for the bit beyond words. The precious part that has to be there, otherwise it’s not the story. Writing the funding application is something else, a totally separate language, shape and design. I could say plenty about that - about how it can force artists to formulate and strategise and perform in ways that they should not - but just for now I want to sit with the fact that there is a story beyond words. Thank god for artists’ wordless stories. Sit there. Live there. Squint sternly at the person who tells you not to. Let decisions and actions and connections flow from it. I think the story worth leaning into offers stillness and sureness in a way that can’t be far wrong. I trust artists with this.

And then there are the people actively creating worlds rather than words. Imagine our perceptions of time, success, progress, speed, work, rest and relationship are handed new constellations; maps, code. Imagine how that would sound, look and feel to receive. This is the work of The Remote Body () - a space for crip and chronically ill writers, artists and envisioners to shape, test and flirt with new languages that feel true. One of many corners where newness is emerging on purpose. One of many corners I’m listening to. The work of communicating embodied experience as a language is not new and has often met its limits. But limits can be where things get most interesting. The autistic, disability justice blogger Amanda Baggs was featured in a short film released in 2007. In it they communicate using autogenerated voices, tapping purposefully at a keyboard aiming to vocalise their autistic experience. When asked about the film, Baggs noted ‘I communicate best outside of language altogether, but they haven’t created the tools to interpret that.’ Colleagues later described ‘touching, tasting and smelling’ as enabling Baggs to have a ‘constant conversation’ with their surroundings’, going as far as to call this non-verbal information their ‘native language’. I’m so struck by the image of this intuitive and deeply connected mode, and the attention it demands from a listener. And yet, as Baggs explains, their ‘failure to speak is seen as a deficit, while other people’s failure to learn [their] language is seen as natural and acceptable.’1

The risks of exploring today’s ground with the nuts and bolts left of yesterday’s tools feel pretty low. As I write, in the heady pressure of a pre-storm atmosphere, days after the sun barely set and the full moon was said to demand bravery, stranger things have happened. Stranger things are happening all the time. On a day when my body is honestly telling me it is both hot and cold outside, what’s not to be believed? After centuries of history books written by men with cash, and days after an unfathomable president used social media to let us know he’s dropped bombs, perhaps it has become riskier not to take risks.

Somebody, somewhere, is making something. Right now. Something that has never existed before and will never exist again. They might be riddled with doubt, or overflowing with a new certainty. Either way, if they attempt the impossible task of telling you about it, listen. New languages are being born in real time.

I buy a farm. It’s the only building or mark on the land that I can see- Everywhere else is rock. A wooden house with a wrap-around wooden porch, just like a cowboy movie, and four perfectly square patches of farmed land curving in front of the house. I don’t know who I paid, or how much, but I’m aware that I’ve acquired it. The fields are growing some kind of grain - A mono crop. Neat squares of long stems with bushy tips, over and over. There is a breeze, but only where the crop grows. The stems lean ever so slightly. I don’t know where the breeze is coming from.

I start pulling them up. With my hands at first, before grabbing a pitchfork and turning over larger clumps of land. The crop had no roots. It’s physical work, but I’m not hurting. It’s time consuming but what is time here? The fields are empty by the end and I have no sense of having wasted time. I sit on the bare ground and grab slow handfuls of the soil, pushing it between my fingers, reading its goodness, inviting it to relax. I take a break on the porch, overlooking my work. I sip tea and count the stars.

I scatter seed. So much seed. Bigger than my fists can contain. Escapees land on the ground as I move. I open my palm and it rains seed. As I dance. Flounce. Celebrate. Laugh. There is so much seed. I don’t know where it keeps coming from but my hands are full. Shoots push through in minutes. The wildflowers grow in real time. I recognise ragged cornflowers and heavy headed poppies, but there is also yellow and purple and orange and pink. Fragile and papery, tactile, diverse; nodding and swaying. I put my hands on my hips and absorb a view that includes stars and wild flowers.

I’m stood on the Moon. The night sky rolls around all sides of the curved line under my feet. It’s rocky, just like I’ve always imagined. And now there are flowers.

I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,

I dream’d that was the new city of friends,

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,

It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,

And in all their looks and words.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Two CDs for £15 at HMV. This was so much money to little Lydia. (It’s not an unnoticeable amount now, but it’s something quite particular in a £1 pocket money per week economy.) I flip flopped between three options, needing to cut one to make use of the deal, eventually leaving with a copy of Aquarium, the debut album from Aqua, and IV by Led Zeppelin. I was delighted. I felt part of something invisible, important and dispersed.

I was ten or eleven or so when my parents took me to my first stadium concert. Preparations included a trip to Windsors World of Shoes and the purchase of a pair of denim-covered platforms, embellished with neon, stitched flowers and silver sequins. I could only just walk in them and I felt amazing. Squeezed between warm and flailing bodies, sugar sweet pop melodies sent the crowd wild and the collective euphoria is something I can still close my eyes and summon. This was my first experience of wild, unselfconscious, free-reigning fandom.

A love for visual art generally makes less noise. It already had me by the time I was wearing the denim platforms, but I might not have been so quick to tell you about it. Does it grow more slowly? Is it harder to talk about? Is it about the fanbase rarely being together to get giddy in one place?

I really clearly remember finding Rembrandt’s etchings, years after his paintings. I went through a phase, that I think a lot of artists do, of copying established artists’ work as best I could. Trying to understand their processes; their line, shape, form, approach, colour mixing, paint application, pencil pressure. And why they would do that, as opposed to any other way. I copied a lot of Rembrandt’s paintings, particularly self portraits, as a teenager and got good grades. Some of my best. But I also quietly copied some of his etchings as sketches - I found them to be such vulnerable and delicate things. Those purposeful and meandering lines. Lots of open space. His well known, brave use of light and dark. They felt so tender. Tender in the bold and resilient kind of way. Like witnessing someone’s wandering through unknown space toward somewhere they intuit. One sketch in particular had me at the kitchen table for hours and hours. Half my life later, I’m walking into the city feeling like I’m about to meet one of my heroes.

If the paintings are the stadium tour, Rembrandt’s etchings are the intimate gig in the well loved local venue. Full of those trips and trills that only happen on stage, and never the album. Standing in front of his palm-sized microcosms, I felt like I was meeting the man. They felt closer to his hands, and his heart, somehow. Etching is a slow and intentional process, but they read with the energy of drawing. Crafted and truthful. Marks in the wrong place, intelligent details, all pointing to the person, his surroundings and the future simultaneously. It sounds so incredibly obvious, but to see the images right there was to be confronted with the existence of this human; his imagination, his process and his realities. There is his signature. He scrawled it himself in 1642. The lineage of people creating goes back to 1642. (It goes back so very much further, but the lineage is so long and complex it can help to land on just one, tangible spot for a moment, can’t it?) I’m surprised that I find myself tearful.

What does quiet fandom mean when it comes to protecting the art form? Does it feel incongruent to yell for quiet things? There’s historic president for yelling to protect the basis much visual art; equality, liberty, peace. But the need to yell for the right to make - with support, with value, in the ways we need to, in the places we need to- is new and particular. My instincts point towards the medium being the message, as Marshall McLuhan might’ve said. That the noisy quiet of a visual archive as long as human history - as complex, diverse, horrifying and beautiful as human existence - speaks all it needs to, to anyone brave enough to look. As a person who looks, closely and joyfully, I sometimes wonder what would prevent some from leaning in. To be specific, I wonder why budget holders and power wielders are choosing to strangle it. Then I remember I’m not afraid of art’s danger. But there is plenty of reason for others to be. I’m certain Rembrandt knew this. I’m certain it’s a knowing in the belly of anyone who makes. Not an audible yell, but a hum and the outworkings of its resonance.

The cracks in the pavements are growing plants. More than that, they’re growing food; Plantain and chickweed and Jack by the Hedge in buckets. Nettle soup and wild garlic pesto. By the cartography of human-centric infrastructure, these plants grow at the edges - by the towpath, at the canal side - but I’ve been making a point of positioning myself at their edges. Considering what it means to centralise their place and see everything else as built on their periphery. A friend once told my partner that it’s important to ask permission before picking Hawthorne to make tea. I’ve extended this to all plants, and we have a growing understanding of one another. A reciprocal agreement.

I finished a year-long job on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I’m wandering. A small and simple learning from the last few years is to clear the diary the day after something significant. It’s guaranteed that the space will be a good thing. I’ve picked up some veg at the outdoor market and meandered into the shopping centre next door, frankly because it’s the cleanest city centre toilet and the hand cream smells nice. To use the local rationale, ‘I’m in the mood to treat myself to a posh wee.’ The automatic doors sweep open and I step off the street into a temple. A temple to expensive clothing. The high, arched ceiling coaxes spa-like sounds from hidden speakers around the space. Endless glass and chrome are polished beyond shiny. My nervous system is suspicious. Bodies glide from store to store, giving the illusion of wealth. Perhaps I give that illusion too, just by being here. A sea of polished, marble tiles stretch the length of the parade, littered with yellow ‘slippery floor’ signs. There’s no rain or spillage - This is a permanently slippery floor. Dangerously so, particularly if you’re wearing a premium heel or a smooth-soled shoe. Shoppers look stiff; on guard. I realise they’re trying to stay upright as they test perfumes and scribble on the back of their hand with lipstick worth more than a day of my time. It’s oddly useful - satisfying, even - to witness a scene that feels even a fraction as ridiculous as the state of the world outside. Thoughtlessly, I’ve left the house in clunky, light blue boots flanked with thick, ridged, rubber. I take confident steps towards the bathroom, breathing deeply for free, fancy smells on the way.

I love the way a lamb will scratch the itch behind its ear with their hind leg, like a dog. I love the way a dog will scratch their itch like a lamb, even into old age. I saw a duck repeat the formula once too. Perhaps there’s reason to believe it’s just the best way to scratch that particular itch.

This week I had my last coffee of several with an artist I’ve been meeting since August. Our chat traverses circuit boards, patterns of the solar system, old jobs and future works in the works. We spend the whole time outside, beginning with sun on our faces before moving to the dappled shade of a nearby tree. He makes friends with a deck chair, overriding past conflicts with them, and I find myself a comfy spot on the grass. The tree spends a full hour flinging its seeds into gaps in our clothing with high accuracy. As we meander towards themes of rejection, resilience and autonomy, striking black and red wings flutter close by, settling on the frame of the deck chair next to us. The wondrous creature, which Google tells me is a Cinnabar moth, goes on to sit there, witnessing the rest of our conversation, for another forty five minutes. I notice them from time to time, amazed they’re still there. They become part of the furniture pretty quickly. I wonder if they’re actually listening. As we make our move, I take out my phone to grab a photo of our new friend, at which point they immediately flit to the back of the chair, before taking off again - this time into the far distance. My friend laughs. “Of course!” I say, remembering that, whilst I am part of nature, I have absolutely no control over it whatsoever. I’m so glad about that.

On my last day, I was thanked for the kindness I’d brought to the job. This is not a common compliment for a project management role, but just about the greatest thing a person could say to me. It went straight to my marrow.

Beltane and good endings go together. Late evening walks in golden glaze with river haze has been early summer bliss for my bones. My form changes when it’s warmer. I am supple flesh and possibility. My partner is releasing a new album in the coming months and it’s more than pride that has made it the perfect companion for these sun soaked days. On the last track, his daughter brings her voice to the table and all hope bursts into being when I hear them yell together. When there’s been reason to feel more anger and exasperation than any body should be asked to find space for, the offer of a counter has been a balm.

Returning to my notebook in transitional times is so familiar; lists, sketches, maps and coordinates for what’s here and where it might lead. Familiar, but never the same. I notice subtle shifts in the focus of my lens. New ways of moving, of speaking. And sometimes it’s a shout, not a whisper. ‘No more of that’ or ‘Not like that, next time.’ I’m less scared of the shouts, these days. I’m alright with their need to be loud. “Yeah, I hear you.” I say, “You’ve got a point. It really messes with things, but you’ve got a point.”

The cafe toilet walls are pasted in sheet music. It must be hundreds of sheets and thousands of notes. It’s a long time since I was fluent, but musical notation is a language I used to speak. Today is strikes me anew as language and the cubicle becomes noisy. I know this kind of noise - It only happens when there’s a certain kind of space. ‘The kind of silence in which another voice may speak’, Mary Oliver said.

HMRC has recognised me as a sole trader since 2013. Since then I’ve been artist, cook, bottle-washer and many more things: A whole business in myself. If I had a boss with a team with a budget there’d be away days, so I’ve always made it a priority to take myself on away days. What are away days for? Reflecting, planning, celebrating. So that’s what I do. I aim for delicious food, creative spaces and a good walk. Good decisions get made on good walks. The agenda is present enough to know new things on purpose, but loose enough to make the most of what emerges. This once biannual practice had lapsed somewhat, so when a nearby hostel was having a Spring sale I booked two nights instead of one and packed a bag.

“You mean like that one?” says , pointing at my rucksack. Letty has just asked if I have memories of how or what got me so excited by art. Lots of roads lead to some kind of answer to this question, but I find myself talking about the adventures I’d take to the bottom of the garden; the ceremony of packing, the piece of string ‘just in case’, choosing a teddy to come along this time and assuring the others their time would come. The feeling of adventure being comfortably close, as long as the basics are on my back, has never left. Letty sees right through my ‘away day’ facade - I’m just taking another trip down the garden.

I had forgotten brass bands.

I had forgotten they rehearse.

The hostel is next to a community hall. The kind you can book by the hour; the kind that has a schedule printed out and pinned up in a frame with peeling varnish. It’s 7pm on a Thursday and still light. Thank you, Spring. I’ve taken a bowl of hot soup out front to feel the last of the sun on my skin, and there are various honks seeping through the red, brick walls. They join thick and layered birdsong to form quite the cacophony. It’s a practice, so I hear the same few bars a handful of times, before a couple of run-throughs. There’s a small cheer and some laughing when they finish. I wonder if the birds are practicing too, or whether this is the real thing. I carry that quiet sense of having stumbled upon something brilliant but not wanting to interrupt any of it.

I meet a Mayfly up close. They live one day and spend more than half of it in water, a nymph. Mayfly lands on my forearm as the last notes drift from the hall. They’re fairly large things with a lot of limbs, so my knee-jerk is to shake them off, but after recognising the forked tail and lack of biting equipment, I leave them be. We sit together for a minute or so, before I pick up my book and carry on reading. They stay put for several pages. Four or five minutes. 0.3% of a life spent on my arm.

An hour of following the canal towpath has brought me to the next town and I need a wee. I spot a supermarket and nip in to use the facilities, grabbing a couple of piece of fruit for the next couple of miles. The queues are long and there’s no self check out, but I’m not rushing. “Is that all you’ve got?” asks a man, who’s jumped across three lines to enquire. “Come in front of us. No problem.” His wife strongly agrees. We chat alongside the conveyor. This is their ‘big shop’. “Someone did the same for me last week when I popped in for a couple of bits - Nice to pass it on." he says. I pay 79p, everyone is smiling, and rejoin the pavement.

“Follow the steep windy road up past the Quaker burial ground.” I’ve asked a local friend the fastest way to get from concrete to hills. It’s a spontaneous text, and I’ve already racked up 7 miles before lunch, so I’m only going for it if he gives me something truly direct. Halfway up it’s already clear he nailed the brief, but before getting even that far I pause at the burial ground. There’s a plaque - 1668 - but otherwise it’s a dusty patch of earth, tree roots poking up in various places and a wobbly wall precariously constructed as the perimeter. The tree belonging to the roots looks old: Wise. It sprawls, reaching and hanging. There’s a tyre swing on one branch. I consider its relationship to paradise.

I ask if they have a gluten free beer. They don’t, but the space is perfect, so I grab a rosé cider and make a nest in one corner. The bubbles bring just the right amount of fizz and ceremony. “Welcome to the AGM” the stem of the glass between my forefinger and thumb. “The board are very happy with our doings this year,” [there is no board. I am the board] “so cheers to that.” All minutes are signed and agreed, priorities for the next year are discussed. ‘We’ leave with a strong plan which may make little or every sense.

Hugging a bowl of porridge on a squashy leather sofa after two sleeps in the hills and two hours ‘til my train I wonder if I’ve completed the agenda that was never written down. I sip coffee and recognise the chirrup of a nearby chiffchaff. Maybe. Probably not. Mostly. Yes.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

— Mary Oliver

I'd caught a train to my nearest city, which in itself felt like some kind of cultural baptism. Flooded with 'how do you do this?' feelings, I dutifully followed the arrows on the gallery floor and found myself alone with twenty portraits. The walls were the darkest possible shade of blue, each image framed in heavy, ornate gold. The edges of the room felt sharp, while the cheeks of the subjects felt pillowy soft. My belly dropped. Before I took a single step closer, I tingled. Fizzed. Hummed. What was going on?

See my Axis Curated Selection here

At the end of last year, Axis asked if I’d curate a selection of their members’ work, and write some notes on my theme to go with it. If I could go back and tell four year old Lydia that we’d grow up and get to write about art, her little face wouldn’t compute it.

However, none of us would’ve wanted to predict that it would be published the same week as some of the worst headlines we wouldn’t dare make up. It’s so unbelievably heavy, I don’t really have any more I can say.

But I had words when I wrote this, and there are multiple ways to read them:

At worst, absorb some thoughts on deep delight - on finding home in unexpected places and getting to stay there. Let yourself be signposted towards artworks you may not have known existed. Be open to your own feelings about them. Choose some ‘better ones’ if you like. I’d love it if you did.

At best, hear my rage. I will not live amongst a permanent culture of unquestioned false analysis and wild justification. A landscape of privileged and protected people making quick and hapless decisions that catastrophically sideswipe people they’ll never meet. An attitude that filters insidiously into the most precious corners of human culture and shared life. The arts sector is one of many, many areas of life being squeezed, limited and defined by panic, exhaustion and lack. It’s being squashed because art is powerful. Art changes places and makes people more themselves. Nothing is more threatening to the ‘powers’ than these things. The art sector in itself isn’t the source of my deepest delight, but it’s one public container of creativity, and one route to it for many, so I’ll continue to yell to protect it. But truthfully, the article I’ve written for Axis begins to name the thing I will not have threatened. I do not think it is trite, simple or small to choose to listen to intuition, celebrate complexity and love out loud in a landscape that systemically aims to flatten all three and gaslight us into thinking they never mattered.

I love art. I love artists more. I will sing this ‘til I’ve no breath left.

Read the article and marvel at the art I chose here. Like the work you see? Let the artists know. Someone, something or somewhere come to mind when you read my preamble? Shout it from the rooftops. Please. Shout it from the rooftops.