Together

or how collaboration holds all of me together

I’ve collaborated for most of my creative life, beginning with my mother over the baking bowl, then as I gained independence I looked to friends.

(I found this card when sorting through my postcard collection and trying to slim it down on moving)

Collaborating these days allows my tendancy towards holding and focusing too tightly to loosen. Collaboration offers a space to play, to let my mind soften into new forms.

Collaboration also allows me to dip my toes into different art forms, while not actually getting wet. Here I am following in the footsteps of dancer and mover, Anna, encouraging us all to find our outside inside dancer. Other people in this Co Lab were Steve (pictured), my long time musician performer collaborator, and Sally an eclectic visual artist who can turn her hand to filmmaking, textiles, sculpture, outdoor art amongst much else.

Working with other writers is a little trickier. Roles are less clearly defined. Overlaps in working practices inevitbaly means divergences in processes. Things expand and contract, tensions unfold into discoveries and unexpected developments, making the results sing and shine in ways I couldn’t possible do solo. All of it is a rubbing off of the sharp corners of my ego and its defence of superiority / inferiority / equality complexes.

More recently I’ve been playworking with Jill, a creative researcher, and Charlotte, an illustrative artist and printmaker. We met fortituously and began wondering how talking can be a creative act, whose process safely holds places of distress or difficulty. This began last year - collaboration is a slow art - with series of conversations that had no specific aim, beyond exploring how sharing time and space might be research into creativity as a form of sanctuary. Our conversations were held by objects - initially we introduced ourselves through precious things we owned. The objects developed into wanting to explore how containment could be made and shared. We decided to make boxes as the perfect receptical for containment.

These boxes were the manifestation of what we felt creating was - playing within [loosely] shared boundaries. You can see how varied they are - from homes to swimming pools to small to loose to unravelling to lidded constructions. Creativity offers all these places for us to inhabit.

Having contained our thoughts, we decided for our final meet to track how we might have got there - all the paths that led us to this point of the Box.

Inevitably (given there were about 12 of us on the project, dropping in and out over the months) it was a big sprawling map of many levels, preoccupations and styles. Map that was more psychological than geographical. More temporal and spatial. This map, we found was best contained as a zine, once we folded it up, cut various pages into it and allowed it to be handled and opened and read through in the uncohesive fashion it was.

Collaboration adheres less to cohesion and order than much of my solo practice. It revels in process over product. Although they produce things.

The desire to produce something brought us to another point: the Being Human festival. Jill has long wanted to be a part of this festival of sharing ideas around what it means to be human. Because of this year’s theme of the festival - Landmarks - and perhaps less explicitly because I was moving away from a beloved lighthouse - we decided one way of exploring this was through a lighthouse. That container which is as contrary as being human, since it’s a beacon, site of comfort, mark of danger and more.

Because of my move, I’ve been pretty rubbish at making anything outside of a comfortable home in which to live - note this is my first ‘monthly’ substack in over two months. Luckily, my collaborators are holding the project as much as they are me. We’ve been whatsapping, emailing, and very occasionally meeting to build the ideas into something. Two months ago we drew the ideas into a walk. Later this month we’re running workshops, a playful performance and a launch to explore what this being human means, what creative acts can offer other people, how what one person sees as a comfort could be a danger to another.

These begin in Light Up Lancaster’s Explore Week, and take to the city’s streets during the Light Up Festival. This collaboration is keeping me grounded to the city I still feel is home, even though I’ve moved a littel further away from it. The city is part of the collaboration now as much as the lighthouse was in teh summer as the original boxes were last summer.

Collaboration as an act of interconnection, between beings, time and space, is vital and messy. It challenges my desire for control and intellectual understanding. It as much a form of creativity as living is for me. It allows me to see that I don’t have to be writing and publishing to feel creatively fulfilled. It is a good thing