#65: 21 Years

I was asked last weekend by a friend what the highlights of my 21 years of practice were.

And I really, really struggled...

To come up with something, something interesting, which I know sounds ridiculous.

I've done a lot in 21 years.

But things like exhibitions and books and things are, I feel like they're well, they're well known, they're well publicised.

You know, they're, they're obvious.

And I was trying to come up with the less obvious things that made a massive difference there.

And what the best bits of those 21 years are.

What I actually came up with, I was surrounded by my friends at the time, what I came up with is, of course, meeting other artists, meeting wonderful creative friends, which is fantastic.

absolutely hands down is the best part of the 21 years of creative practice is the people I've met but also mainly I've had the opportunity I've had the space and the capacity to create what I want to make you know make absolutely what I want to do and that is that's the real joy of it But what I'm going to do was talk through right from the beginning, 2005, 21 years ago, feels such a long time ago now, and through to today and where I am today.

So I've been thinking about how to do this.

I am doing this, as you can probably tell, totally off the cuff without writing or preparing this too much in advance.

I started writing a list of every year and picking either a piece of work or a project that would kind of symbolise, signify that year with a kind of visual timetable, visual timeline, which obviously doesn't work as a podcast.

And I discovered that trying to find photos from 2005 to 2010 was going to be really difficult and I would have to be delving around in hard drives and I decided not to not to do that one today but to start instead with just thinking about some of the key experiences, activities and just key things that have happened over that time rather than the kind of the opportunities, the people I've met, the things that have made a difference.

They might be the pivot points or the decisions or the The good fortune, the luck, the success, the things that have made the difference to my career rather than the specific activities themselves.