Keeping the faith…

I knew that if I just kept going, something would turn up, but, as time went on, I started to get worried. “What if this time it DOESN’T turn up?”

This year has been a bit weird really, in that from the beginning of January I knew I was at some point going to have my knee replacement surgery. My mobility was getting worse, and I was saying “no” to things because of it, and hoping that afterwards I could catch up with people and say “I’m baaaack” (but without the Terminator undertones). This I have done… six months post surgery although not 100% normal, I do feel I can do most things.

Anyway, since then I’ve been picking at it. Moving furniture, clearing and tidying and chucking stuff out. I’ve cut up old drawings to reuse the paper… and I have been recombining bits of old work to look at relationships between things to try to see if there are loose ends that could be followed up.

In amongst the old things were newer things, for example the exploration of sound and song that I did in collaboration with Bill Laybourne. I’m not quite sure how long this took to percolate through, but the other morning, sat up in bed with a cup of tea, I realised this could be the thing that could be built upon and pursued. I also realised that it might be the sort of self-contained project that could be fundable. I fired off a couple of quick emails and within a couple of days I had positive, interested responses.

So I have gone from feeling miserable about everything being pointless, to having a real sense of what the whole of next year could look like. In addition to this I have had a couple of “bites” of interest that could also be pursued alongside my trampling through the woods of my childhood.

Sometimes when you get an idea it seems so obvious you wonder why you didn’t have it sooner. My plan now seems as if all of the work from the last five or more years was leading to it, but I couldn’t see it until I reached the clearing in the woods. The clearing was both literal and metaphoric. Before my operation I cleared the decks and cleaned the studio. I even cleaned the window! When I sat back in it, I had to spend time there, looking and letting things filter through before I could see what was there all the time!

So now I have it in my sights the first part of the work is to lay out a large piece of paper and write down all of the factors that have brought me to this point, and then decide what happens next. 

In the new year I will get in touch with potential partners and get that funding bid written. At the moment  am thinking “How could they NOT fund this?” But I have been here before. Clarity and perseverance are the keys to success!