Is this too personal?
I had a conversation with my friend Rach after a swim in Porthtowan.
We were sitting on the beach, still a bit cold, still a bit salt-stupid, the sea doing its usual thing of making everything feel slightly more fixed than it did an hour before.
We started talking about art, but not in a structured way. More like it came up between things. And the question that kept circling was whether art needs to be personal.
Or maybe more accurately, whether it can’t help but be.
At some point I found myself saying something like: is it too much if something comes from me? And even as I said it, I didn’t really trust the framing. Because it isn’t about me. Not really.
It’s about that moment where something I’ve noticed, or moved through, or stood inside of for a second, might also be seen by someone else and suddenly become something shared.
Rach said something that stayed with me:
even if it starts with you, it doesn’t stay there.
And that feels closer to it. Because I’m not really interested in making work that points back at me.
I’m interested in what happens in the gap, between what I’ve seen, or felt, or passed through, and what someone else brings to it when they meet it.
That small space where it stops belonging to me at all.
Where it becomes slightly unstable.
And open.
And slightly different every time it’s encountered.
So when I think about “personal” in art, I don’t mean autobiography.
I mean origin point. A kind of first contact. Something that started somewhere and then gets handed over. And maybe the real question is not am I important enough to talk about myself.
But: what happens when something I’ve paid attention to becomes something someone else can stand inside of for a moment, and recognise in their own way?
We didn’t resolve it on the beach.
We just let it sit there between us, along with the wind and the cold and the feeling of having already moved on from the conversation even while still in it.
But I think that’s what stayed with me. Not the idea of “me” in the work.
But the idea of transfer. Of attention passed on.
Of something shared without ever fully belonging to anyone.
Holly
Somewhere near the Atlantic.
