Arts Council Wales posted yesterday about the twelve artists who were successful in this year’s Creative Steps for Individuals programme. And my photo was among the twelve.
This was a huge moment for me in terms of allowing myself permission.
I am so grateful to be one of the participants receiving funding to carry out their arts practice as part of the Creative Steps fund.
I finally feel like I am allowed to create.
I know we shouldn’t need permission to do our work. But for me, that permission has been a genuine barrier. A long one, with deep roots.
In 1994 I was in the first year of my Visual and Performing Arts degree. I started exploring the moments when music and dance and lighting combined. I couldn’t name it yet but I knew it was something about the coming together of the three sensory channels.
I was alone and supporting myself through the degree and started to worry about whether I was being selfish and should just go and get a ‘proper’ job. The third year students on the course were talking about how few jobs there were and this made me feel worried. I was also struggling in other ways and the upshot was that I left the course and changed degrees. I studied psychology and occupational therapy and psychotherapy and became a therapist. But the artist in me never went away.
I also studied an Integrative Arts for Health, Education & Community Settings degree because I wanted to bring creativity into my work. So the artist in me nver went away, it just kept running alongside everything.
In my spare time over the past thirty years I’ve been trying out several disciplines to try and explore and express that enquiry that began in 1994. I tried poetry, text art, writing, songwriting, singing, all the while wondering if I could ever learn to compose and produce music (to me it felt like a dark art that only certain people could master). But in 2022 I set out on a journey to see if I could learn it. Now, four years into my journey and I can compose and produce sound and music.
In Feb 2024 I completed an MMus in Music & Sound, specialising in music production and songwriting. But also during this degree I went deep into studying musical awe and embodied music perception. It was here that I encountered J.J Gibson’s work into the sensing of space, and Landon Peck’s research into the psychology of musical awe.
For the first time I feel like I am getting closer to being able to realise my lifelong enquiry into sensory convergence and emotional expansion. There have been events I have experienced in my life during moments of loss, where I have noticed that sound, space and movement have come together to make me feel a sense of expansion and awe. I believe there can be a close relationship between loss and awe.
To have been given the gift of protected time to explore this makes me feel incredibly grateful.
I am taking steps towards being able to express the enquiry and being able to call myself an artist.
I’m going to write about the journey here and on Substack. Let’s see where it goes.