Let's Make Something Happen

As my man Phife Diggy from A Tribe Called Quest once said:

Put one up for the Phifer, it's time to decipher

The ills of the world make the situation brighter

I wish I could sit down with Phife and discuss this right now. I’d respectfully ask him if he still felt this way after the year we’ve had. The ills of the world have been difficult to ignore in 2020 and I’ve personally struggled to navigate this while confronted with the necessity to create.

Thankfully though, the first stage of the ReFramed COVID-19 project is now complete and with images submitted the focus moves on to planning how the work will be published and shared. This also allows for some reflection and quite honestly the process has been tortuous although ultimately very rewarding. The challenges I anticipated at the project’s outset, mainly practical, were quickly superseded by the emotional and philosophical hurdles I encountered as I started to unpack the main themes I hoped to explore in the work.

The COVID crisis has forced us all to confront loss, anger, abrupt and drastic change, loneliness and isolation and any number of anxieties on personal, family, community, national and worldwide levels. That’s a lot!

The horrific onslaught seems almost commonplace now, such that its ongoing impact can be overlooked, but we’re all still wading through all of this stuff with no end in sight. The sheer scale of all the ‘stuff’ has at times been utterly paralysing, making it impossible to see beyond the deluge of each moment to anything approaching an abstract or creative idea. It’s difficult to plan, dream and conceptualise in that state…which is not to say that there aren’t people out there who’ve managed to be incredibly productive and creative during these months, just that I’ve not been one of them!

I’m very grateful for the guidance of Andrew Jackson, one of the ReFramed team, who has been mentoring me through the last couple of months. He’s been able to provide wise counsel and some outside objectivity during moments of doubt and/or sheer panic, grounded in his own experiences as a practitioner and human. The opportunity to bounce ideas off him and pick his brain has been one of the most valuable elements of the bursary award. 

How do you avoid getting trapped in your own head, when you have to go in there to find the work?

Also, how do you separate yourself from the subject, by at least enough, to be able to say something about it that resonates outside of yourself?

Acknowledging and reconciling the many ways in which I am personally and profoundly connected to this work (as a Black person, as a healthcare professional, as a survivor of COVID-19) was one of the first barriers that had to be overcome before I was able to successfully proceed to actually making the pictures and consumed by far the majority of the effort in the completion of this project.

One of the overriding feelings while conceiving this work was a simmering frustration, a feeling that encompassed my own personal circumstances as well as wider considerations. Apart from the direct and immediately devastating impact COVID-19 has had on individuals, families and communities, this year has in many ways highlighted deep inequities that deny so many people true agency in their own lives and render them unable to fully explore their own potential or define their own futures. To some this might sound like a crazy assertion - ‘we live in a free country Justin, everyone has the same opportunities and chances’ - but if you’re of this view I’d urge you to step outside of your own experience for a minute and do some basic research, with an open mind. 

While I don’t have the space, time or inclination to unpack all of that for you here, I would like to present some information that’s relevant to the ReFramed COVID-19 project. This from an Office for National Statistics report on coronavirus-related deaths, from May 2020:

• This provisional analysis has shown that the risk of death involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) among some ethnic groups is significantly higher than that of those of White ethnicity.

• When taking into account age in the analysis, Black males are 4.2 times more likely to die from a COVID-19-related death and Black females are 4.3 times more likely than White ethnicity males and females.

• People of Bangladeshi and Pakistani, Indian, and Mixed ethnicities also had statistically significant raised risk of death involving COVID-19 compared with those of White ethnicity.

• After taking account of age and other socio-demographic characteristics and measures of self-reported health and disability at the 2011 Census, the risk of a COVID-19-related death for males and females of Black ethnicity reduced to 1.9 times more likely than those of White ethnicity.

• Similarly, males in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic group were 1.8 times more likely to have a COVID-19-related death than White males when age and other socio-demographic characteristics and measures of self-reported health and disability were taken into account; for females, the figure was 1.6 times more likely. 

• These results show that the difference between ethnic groups in COVID-19 mortality is partly a result of socio-economic disadvantage and other circumstances, but a remaining part of the difference has not yet been explained.

Feel free to read the full report, here

The disparity of experience of the pandemic is mirrored in many other areas of modern life and while I’ve highlighted ethnic inequalities above, there are numerous gender/class/postcode-based inequalities to be found everywhere. Every day yet another aggrieved group seems to be crying out for help, for equitable treatment and proper consideration. Today for example, it’s the people of Greater Manchester, but tomorrow it will be something or someone else. 

COVID-19 has dragged all of these issues into the light and unmasked so much that had previously only been covertly plotted and secretly endured. These prevailing concerns and the unease that they foment form the backdrop for the work that I ended up making for ReFramed. To have made something that failed to acknowledge this thread of feeling running through the last 6 months for me would have felt ludicrously dishonest. 

Next time, I’ll go into a bit more detail about the process of actually developing the work with these considerations in mind. Until then it’s only right that we finish with some more ATCQ because, why not…

Let’s make something happen!

Research/Life

One of the reasons I decided to write about my work in progress in this way was to affirm (and remind myself of) the fact that the reality of the creative process is rarely of a brilliant artist working singlemindedly towards the production of a widely-acclaimed masterpiece, but rather a quite normal person, who cares about something, battling various practical and financial obstacles in order to bring into being a piece of work that, in the majority of cases, nobody else cares about at all, with the progress towards this objective being anything other than a straight line. 

Thinking about this brings to mind the wise words of Wendy McMurdo, an actually brilliant artist, who I was fortunate to be tutored by in the final phase of my MA. During one of my many existential crises she calmly informed me that the numerous issues and problems preventing me from making work that I was describing to her were in fact simply part and parcel of being an artist, and that the associated self-doubt and uncertainty were all part of the creative process. Her advice being that I should basically suck it up and make work anyway because that was the only way anything ever got done, the only way any progress was ever made. Coming from her, these words meant a great deal and have stuck with me ever since. 

So, I write to remind myself of this and also to keep myself accountable and it is in this spirit that I make this latest entry in the WIP log. The last few months have of course being challenging for everyone, what with the rona, and life as we knew it seems to be gone for good. I’ve been overwhelmed with work stuff and also had to survive my own bout of the virus, so it’s been a challenging time for sure. Amongst all this though, I’ve tried to stay committed to the idea of continuing on regardless, as best as I could under the circumstances. One of the lessons I think, is that instead of being hard on yourself for not being as productive or creative as maybe you’d hoped to be in certain circumstances, it’s preferable to stick to your guns and just do what you can. Every little helps and with each small step you’re that bit little closer to the end goal. It’s important for me to remember that there never is a ‘perfect’ time to make work, with absolutely no obstacles or distractions to contend with, there’s always just now.

As I’ve continued planning and researching for a project focusing on mental health, there’s been an inexorable convergence with the themes of Reaching Out. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

Loneliness and solitude certainly offer psychological challenges, but it’s been really interesting that I’ve found myself circling back round and being forced to consider loneliness from new angles. Another lesson perhaps, that research is never wasted even if it seems to be not directly related to the topic at hand at first, and a reminder that my MA work lives on, and remains unfinished business. 

I’ve been reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. Looking at how loneliness has been conceptualised, written about and experienced through history, it’s an ambitious work indeed. Interestingly, Alberti starts from the position that loneliness is not intrinsically bad, and that there are positives to be gained from experiencing this state. Describing loneliness as a ‘cluster of emotions’ rather than a single feeling, the author argues that it hits differently at different life stages such as divorce or old age. Alberti also argues that loneliness is not an inevitable or universal aspect of the human experience, and when encountered can also confer benefits such as increased self-knowledge or creativity. 

It’s fascinating to consider that loneliness has not always been with us, simply because the vocabulary associated with this experience did not exist before about 200 years ago. Prior to that, being alone was not at all bound up with typically negative ideas of loneliness that we take for granted today, but rather considered a much more neutral state of being. This idea is really interesting to me, that how we describe or think about things, materially affects the way we experience them and it’s an interesting idea to explore visually in the future.

Another book I’ve covered recently is Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr. This is an interesting story, about a woman going through a difficult time who’s revisited by an imaginary friend from her childhood, returned to accompany her through her troubles. This friend, a lion named Jericho, appears when things seem to be slowly falling apart in her life, and while their relationship is never fully explained, there quickly develops a seemingly mutually beneficial co-dependence. The key theme that resonated with me here was the idea of perception, of being able to ascertain what is real and what is not, and whether sometimes it’s actually easier, even safer, to surrender to the constructions of our minds rather than address difficult things in the ‘real’ world. The idea of spending so long immersed in your own perceptions that you struggle to differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined is also interesting. How does one categorise experiences that can seem very real to us, and from which we may derive some positives, if they are not perceptible to others…are they any less valuable, less real? This boundary between our tangible material world, and that of our very personal, internal world is a fascinating place to explore.