Working From Here

I’ve finished my residency. I’d always wanted to take a residency, often mooning aspirationally over sun dappled cabins in the catskills, dorset boltholes and a long held fantasy of just jacking it all in, pottering around ibiza with a flaunted paunch and a paintbrush.

The reality of these things is always different. We always bring ourselves. Our idiosyncrasies, our vices, our tendency to idleness or doomscrolling.

A strange and wonderful thing with the VCA residency is its all been online: post modern, post post modern, wherever this new place in our new lives  is now. A little bit here a little bit there, work from here, work from there. As the worlds normies seem to use the crazy past few years to reorganise promotions and mortgages, I feel atomised and scattered: finding myself increasingly drawn to catsitting, as the wheels of capitalism inexorably suck us back in. Every week the black hole of the office seems to clunk one notch further up the dial.

I am so lucky to have an employer, a job, a lifeline. But it increasingly feels like a relic, an artefact, a thing we did ‘before all this’. Before we all worked from here.

But where is here? I have no centre really, or home, or studio. I have work to do, illustrations to draw, projects to lead. Yet still I doomscroll, prevaricate, get lost in the inspiration of distant friends, a community of peers, strangers, kindred spirits. As I worry about the affect of all the dopamine triggers on my poor addled 45 year old brain, it simultaneously feels like a good thing. A world soul a loose web, sending each other little jolts of happy and affirmation through art, pictures, creativity. Human mycelium.

I don’t quite know what is next for me post residency; it definitely wont be superrare or hauser + wirth. 

All I know is that I need to keep working from here.