Book Mouse

An artist’s weblog sounds rather grand.  It’s that word ‘artist’ that makes me stop and think.  Is it a title? A description? A label?  Does it have any certain meaning?  Am I an artist because of what I do? Or because I say that I am? I began to call myself an artist several years ago when I was designing and making  jewellery.  Then I was a ‘bead artist’.  Why the qualification?  Why not simply ‘an artist’? It is only now that I am studying fine art at university that I say ‘I am an artist’.

Webster’s New English Dictionary says that an artist is ‘one who practises fine art, esp painting: one who does anything very well.’  The definition does nothing to help me, it only gives rise to more questions.  What exactly is ‘fine art’?  Who decides? Why especially painting?  Is such a qualification even  relevant in 2009?  Everyone does something ‘very well’, so does that mean that everyone is an artist? 

I have come late to this strange world of ‘fine art’.  I was in my twenties before I visited an art gallery, in my forties before I came face to face with anything that could be called modern or contemporary.  I am still impressed and awed by my colleagues. Overwhelmed by visits to exhibtitions.  Childishly delighted with my own creativity when some thing works.  Childishly crushed when it does not. 

I am deeply interested in ideas around memory and identity.  I constantly mine my own memories and experiences for my work.  Not because I am self obsessed, not because I think that there is any thing special about my life, but precisely because there is nothing special. I am ordinary. My life is and has  been ordinary.  Western civilisation makes a god of individualism and yet the more choices we are offered, the more similar we become.  I am a story teller.  And the stories I tell belong to everyone.

The Open Hand- bead embroidery on leather. This autobiographical piece provides a bridge between jewellery making and my fine art practice