When my husband and I first began planning a move out of London, one of our stated aims (aside from a slower pace of life, more time spent in nature and of course, saving money) was to give me the time and the space to reconfigure my artistic practice and creative work. We both thought that once I was no longer spending my days alternately freezing or boiling in a tin-roofed industrial building in Hackney Wick, paying London studio rent (and the real killer - business electricity rates) I would finally be able to get off the hamster wheel and prioritise making new work.
Privately, I imagined that I would hit the ground running. I envisioned myself launching new collections of tapestries, booking exhibitions, revamping my website and landing new clients. After all, I always feel revitalised when I move into a new studio! And surely moving to such a beautiful part of the world would be inspiring and energising too, right? I imagined myself taking long solo walks across the countryside, sketching stone carvings in little out-of-the-way churches and sailing on the river.
Of course, real life never goes quite according to plan. In a new part of the country, in a new home and a new studio, I quickly discovered that making serious changes to my artistic practice wasn’t the work of a month or two. Even without the pressures of my London practice, I found myself reverting to old behaviours and bad habits. My looms languished while I stared at my computer. I’ve probably spent more time winding yarn for customers than I have weaving new experimental tapestries.
I realised that to make any serious changes, I needed to dig into the underlying beliefs and motivations and fears that have driven me over the course of my career, and why, time and time again, I’d let these undercurrents drag me in all sorts of directions that I never planned to go.
You see, my business over the years has followed a predictable sequence -
I need to make money.
I make something to sell. I try and keep it as simple as possible in order to keep costs down.
The something I’m making inevitably takes much, much longer to make than expected, and the cost becomes higher than planned.
I still need to make money, so I list the piece at a cheaper price than I really should.
Regardless of whether not the piece sells, I still need to make money, so I cast around for something else to sell.