Having just come out the other side of a PhD (waiting on confirmation after corrections), I’m now in a miasma of ‘what next?’.  For various reasons it was theory-based rather than practice-based, and for various other reasons it’s taken more years than expected. As a result, I’ve not made any work, or even thought about making work, for a REALLY long time. I’ve missed it but now not sure how to get going again. As part of viva preparations I had to think about the ‘what next?’ question. None of my ‘what next?s’ prepared me for my examiner’s thoughts – they want me to publish my thesis! My thoughts about ‘what next?’ involved applying what I have been thinking about all these years into making some work – without actually working out how to do it… 

I’ve been scanning my documentation archive into a digital archive because I’ve never got around to it before, and because most of it was created before I owned a digital camera. I’ve begun uploading some of it to this site so it can show what I was doing when I was still making art. Some of its nice to see again and, actually, some of it still has potential for working up – I can even use my PhD material to re-theorise it. I can’t face wheeling out the museum in a suitcase again – without substantial rethinking – but at one stage I had begun to work up the Custodian’s lecture into ‘The Curious Pea’, a history of the collection; is that worth returning to? I also loved rereading the Great Pea Experiment – it had the potential to be more than it ended up being – there is something unfinished about that piece.  

Is it a mistake to look back, though, is such potentially nostalgic thinking likely to result in new creativity or stunt it? On the one hand, it does at least slightly bolster the confidence – I used to be able to do this stuff. As Sylvia Plath once said, “The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt”. One the other, it has been nearly a decade – yes I know, where does the time go – so should one go back and risk being stuck in the past whilst the rest of the world has moved on – “You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one” – or is that too self-help guru. 

The influence of my work is apparent in my research – the narratives that accumulate about objects and places, the ways in which these narratives can be communicated, and the interplay of narrative, authenticity and evocativity. Also, I suppose, the authenticating hand of the museum, archive or heritage provider. So, in some senses, there hasn’t been a hiatus, merely a shift from practice to theory – however, that still means shifting back, at least to the middle ground between the two. I referred to the intermediate ground when I was talking about my objects of study, with a constant temptation to insert a Venn diagram to ram home the point and here it is again – on one side of the diagram is practice and in the other is theory and in the intermediate space lies the ideal…can one reverse back into it?

Oh! …and I need to find a form of employment that uses my doctorate…..no pressure!

“I perceive small things”, said the artist perceptively, “and the things have a minute inscription”. However, the inscription was very faint, a trace, a hint, a suspicion; it appeared to the artist to be a narrative, a tale, a yarn, which should be told, represented, spun.

“Curiouser & Curiouser”