On the process of transformation through making art

And the feeling of emerging into a new identity

detail of work in progress

Transformation is a strong word.

When do we really experience true and utter transformation? The last few years have taught me a lot about change and I think I’ve just about made my peace with the fact that everything is impermanent. That in itself has been a huge shift from my previous, life-planning mode of existence.

But transformation? That’s a deep process. Maybe it creeps up on us. Certainly if I compare the person I was ten years ago when I started my degree to the person I am now, on the brink of stepping out into a freeform art journey, I can see the transformation in my life - not only my mindset and creativity but the whole way in which I see life.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that this transition time has been so unsettling and profound.

As I wrote about a while ago, I am in the process of sifting through the work I accumulated whilst studying for my degree in Textiles and finding my way forwards.

I tackled the sketchbooks - you can read about that here - and now I’m onto the samples and finished pieces I made both for the degree and for my forays into ceramics and painting.

I have been pretty ruthless about getting rid of everything but the things I truly loved (largely due to a lack of storage space!) so there isn’t a lot left. But the things I have are those that truly connected to my heart and soul when I made them. They have been boxed up for months now, though. So as I set up my new studio and work out where I’m going next, it seemed important to get to the bottom of every box of work and be truthful with myself about where I am now.

It is a disturbing feeling. I pick up a piece of work I’ve made myself, not that long ago. And yet I feel nothing. It feels like something someone I don’t even know made once long ago then set aside. It lies limp in my hand, emitting no energy, eliciting no response within me. I can admire its beauty and skill and what it is saying but - crucially - it isn’t speaking to me.

I set it to one side.

Next, a scrap of a painting and something inside me stirs. Says ‘yes’. Yes to the depth and energy and richness. I made this a year ago and haven’t looked at it since yet it reaches me immediately. Maybe that’s the freshness of returning to it after a break. But maybe it’s the open question of a conversation interrupted asking me ‘and?’ ‘what now?’

detail of work in progress

Change and transformation are powerful movements. I am grateful for Martha Beck’s analogy in Finding your Own North Star of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. Thinking I knew about this process, initially I dismissed it as somewhat obvious (sorry, Martha) but as I read on, she explains that rather than undergoing a slow and gradual reformation, a caterpillar actually fully dissolves inside the sanctuary of its cocoon before its cells reconfigure to grow in new form. I have no idea about the science of this but I don’t need the science. What I need is the vivid visual image to make sense of where I am now in terms of my art, and maybe life too. I need the acknowledgement that transformation can be profound, scary and total; and maybe I also need the permission to go through a process of complete dissolution rather than fiddling about round the edges and not really diving deep.

I was fully prepared at the end of my textiles degree to have a time of transition; to do an evaluation, an audit, to plan the way ahead. I knew there would be things I wanted to keep and things I wanted to leave behind. What I wasn’t prepared for was a full-on melt down, as Beck terms it, in which much of the work I made as part of the degree and which at the time was so heartfelt, would now leave me: give a smile, a gentle wave and head off into the sunset, leave me standing kind of alone with a wide open plain ahead.

It’s not alarming, just unexpected. But as I think it through, I wonder if the degree was in fact the cocoon I needed to allow my old self to melt down, a safe place within which to let go of old ideas about art, myself and life and end up with a fully fluid ‘gloop’, as Beck terms it, which could reconfigure itself into a new being. This isn’t something we can allow to happen in the context of everyday life where people have expectations of us, there is a living to earn and family to tend. When do we truly get to cocoon ourselves and let it all go? But in the context of my degree, each new piece of learning dissolved the old certainties a little more. That is why I called my Instagram and this publication Slow Unravelling but I like the caterpillar/butterfly metaphor better as it has more purposefulness and new life at the end of it. And the ability to fly.

Rather than ending up with a messy bundle of unraveled yarn, I get to be a butterfly.

Who doesn’t want that?

Beck describes the melt down as Phase 1 of the transformation and finding your true North Star. Phase 2 is ‘dreaming and scheming’ as we search for what it is - precisely - that feels so good and warm and nourishing that we turn instinctively towards it and head that way. She recommends we take our time in this phase, thoroughly testing out what the ‘thing’ we yearn for might be in an experiential way. This is how the present feels to me: a thirst for new processes and materials, sudden urges to try different things in my art and powerful yearnings for something else in my life.

Beck also warns of the discomfort that can come as we dissolve our old self and transform. I can see this in relation to my art. For ten years I have posted on Instagram about my textiles but my current series is an exploration of abstract landscape painting. I can see how what Beck terms the ‘social self’ - the self that exists in relation to others and to social norms - might be embarrassed by this apparent volte face. It might look confused to some, or like abandonment to others who have invested their faith and encouragement in my emotive explorations of cloth.

But it’s still me. This is what Beck calls the ‘essential self’ - the deep-down core of the self that exists independently of our context - is pulling me towards now. It’s not an abandonment of what came before, it’s a growth out from it; I think of it as a branch (arm?) of mycellia spreading out to explore the rich, nourishing earth it senses in one direction. At another point, the spread will go in another direction still fed by the same inherent passions and curiosity.

Or, to go back to the dissolved ‘gloop’ of my former art self, the essential self is jumping for joy and enjoying the few-found fluidity. Anything goes.

In the end, if our art is expressive of the self and our experiences in the moment, then it is inevitable and desirable that the art changes as the self changes.

Thanks for reading, I hope some of this resonates with you. Do leave a comment - I’d love to hear your own experiences of profound shifts in your art making or mindset and how making art helps the process. I’m thinking deeply at the moment about the transformation that’s going on in my life too - but that’s for another time!

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On the studio wall:

As you may have seen on my Instagram posts, I’m indulging a long-held urge to explore abstract landscapes, or finding ways of conveying just how I feel in my happy landscape place which for the last few years has been the coastal reedbeds of North Norfolk in the South East of the UK.

These are open, expansive and flat places that are full of fluidity and movement where, for whatever reason, I feel fully grounded and at home. It is hundreds of miles from my current home in North Yorkshire, or indeed anywhere else in the UK I have ever called home. But from the first time I arrived there in 2015 I instantly felt connected and at peace.

More of that later. Just to say that on the studio wall at the moment is a fairly eclectic collection of sketches and ideas as I dip my toe into this body of work. I’ve been surprised by the drama of what’s emerging as I think about that sense of deep rootedness.

new work, mixed media on A3 paper