Craft
There's a gallery I visit once a month or so near where I live and work. I like the guys that run it and like their shows and sense of play with the work that they show and curate. When I walk in and have a chat they ask me 'working on anything?' and the answer is usually pretty bad.
I do work on things but my process is slow and enthusiastic. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and getting excited, but not as much time photographing or printing or exhibiting. Publishing is a bit tricky to share with this audience as they know me as an artist first, friend second and publisher third.
Instead I spend time working on publishing, selling and book making. To some extent these are the larger pieces of my craft: things I work at day in and day out and, I think, I'm getting a lot better at. When I edit people's work to make books right now I feel confident that my decisions are good, or at least make sense, and my design notions are, similarly, getting better. If you think of craft as something one is continually honing I'd say that this is the best example of that for me.
But recently I've started to hone the way that I exhibit. See I really like exhibitions - I think installations and exhibitions can be really exciting, immersive and complex. I love exhibitions that feel like I'm entering someone's world - that block out the rest of the world and suck me in. I want an experience, something where the whole thing makes me go 'woah', rather than just the painting or the sculpture or whatever.
To some extent, I think an artist adding one cherry on top of a fairly standard hang is often enough. An object, one picture hung weirdly, something special and unique. Not every show has to be flawlessly original, but each show should have something that pushes it a bit, at least to my taste.
But when I look at my own exhibiting I can see that rarely have I met even that standard. Which is ok because I, like everyone, am learning and working to get somewhere. Of course my early exhibitions aren't going to meet my standards now because my standards have changed. But what is exciting, genuinely exciting, is thinking about how what I do next COULD meet those standards. See I've exhibited the Killing Sink a few too many times in the same way - unframed prints, printed on soft paper, pinned to the wall. They look great and I'm proud of what I've done, however it's time for something new.
This excites me because I don't want to be done with the work. It took me 5 years to make so for it to have, say, only a 12 month life just doesn't feel good to me at all. But it'd be absurd to exhibit it the same way over and over again because, shit, that is insanely dull. I like the idea that each new time I exhibit it there's something I can try or build on. And again this is NOT something I've been doing. Yet. But I am doing to start and I have some cool ideas, so we'll see how they come together.
One of the reasons I stick with making art is because it feels like it's rewarding. Improving is self-driven and oh so satisfying and thrilling. Sometimes I'm just abuzz with what I COULD do and that nearly infinite space of ideas is where I love to live.
Another way I could look at craft is that my book binding is a form of craft. This isn't something I've written much about, but for a long time I wanted my art practice to involve hand made books - the way I approached that in 2015-2017 wasn't something I could build on, but since learning more about book making I've come back to binding as something I'd like to pick back up.
This time instead of producing books through handmade processes as objects to sell, they are more ways of understanding my own photography, art and ideas, as well as facilitating learning in workshops I'm teaching.
Anyway, craft is an interesting topic - what we spend time getting better at is interesting to me. I'm not someone who wants to improve endlessly - I'm good enough at exercise, at communication, at reading, at writing, at my day job, at lots of things - I really only try to get better at cooking, art making, being a good person and living well. That's more than enough for me.