Collaboration

The year is more than halfway through and somehow my scribbling in red dry erase marker in my study “Be a Professional Artist” seems an ever present reality. Workshops, exhibitions, drafts.

I feel caught up in life. Kinda like those dreams where it feels like if you run fast enough you can float through the air. I’m here running in place but also moving seemingly nowhere. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating but also completely surreal.

This fall, actually the first autumn weekend on Saturday September 28th, I’ll be exhibiting my first ‘performance’ art piece at the CB Nuit festival in Corner Brook, NL, entitled ‘A Meal with Friends’. And next week, Tuesday August 20th, I’m hosting a workshop at the Hold Fast festival about felting techniques.

The themes of community and identity in my art pieces are also full force in the dissertation writing trenches. I have to be honest as my legs move a little quicker and I continue to stay afloat in this dreamlike state of giddy exhaustion and terror all I can see is collaboration. Connecting, community, friendships, relationships, whatever word you want to use humans aren’t meant to do anything alone. We’re communal creatures.

Before I submitted my application to CB Nuit I spoke with a friend about my idea. Now I hadn’t planned on speaking to them about my application but I mentioned I was applying and they asked me if I wanted to talk about it with them. I want to make it clear that this friend is an artist, a really good one with awards and shit. They have this reserved confidence, I think some people mistake it for stoicism. So when the register of their voice changed in this way they have of somehow ‘stepping back’ with their voice, soft and calm, and self-assured, “do you want to talk about it?” The gentle uptick at the end somehow combining the clearness of a question with the unassuming femininity of an upspeak. I of course couldn’t help but slowly and clumsily explain my plans.

Now it’s not that I hadn’t spoken to anyone about my project proposal but that I hadn’t spoken to anyone who’s opinion and critique I would regard so highly. Honestly it’s not that I can’t take the critique but that Im trying to course correct for a lifetime of always assuming the critique is valid and that I absolutely must find a way to reshape my work or worse myself to the interests of the critiquer. So though I value their opinion I was concerned to hear it because what if I wasn’t able to let it go? I also wasn’t prepared to really speak about my idea and they have had very limited exposure to my creative ramblings so I was concerned about being able to fully explain myself.

But we struggled through and I explained and they listened actively and gave a few very useful and valid questions and solutions for things like potential locations. And then they hit me with it they suggested I consider doing the piece with another artist/performer. They wanted me to consider how having a conversation with one person might allow something deeper to happen. They wanted me to consider collaboration.

The first thing that popped into my head when they mentioned it was panic at the thought of having to find someone to collaborate with. More specifically panic at the thought that I knew absolutely no one I’d be comfortable with asking to collaborate. And I was also a little annoyed. I mean for fuck sake didn’t they understand my project involves collaboration?! Just with the public instead of one other person? For goodness sake collaboration doesn’t have to happen just between artists. But alas I was being woefully naive in how I viewed collaboration, and especially how others view it.

My friend’s suggestion for collaboration was good, really good. I haven’t stopped thinking about it and what it could look like to collaborate with someone on a piece in which we develop and create through the intimacy of an ongoing conversation. There’s this essence of sustainability present in the ongong nature of any conversation. And performing a conversation with just one person over many performances would be fascinating. I think there are a million iterations of how an ongoing conversation as performance art could logistically work, but the more interesting truth is my feelings about this. I’m scared of having an ongoing conversation with one person, especially someone who isn’t a stranger. I prefer conversations with new faces, people I’ve never seen slack jawed and wide eyed. People I know nothing about and more importantly know nothing about me. I’ve selfishly clung to my individualism, centering myself in community.

Thinking about collaboration is shifting and expanding my thoughts on what it means for me to be engaged. And I recognize that I need to put more effort into sustaining relationships.

I write, think, and talk a lot about community. All my academic work has been about community. Even my visual art is about community. My piece for CB Nuit is about community. I take the concept of grassroots efforts, and the importance of engaging with those directly around me very seriously. I do everything I can to actualize the theories I espouse. I personally see the tremendous healing power in community. But I’ve neglected to think about the importance of sustainability when it comes to relationships and not just maintaining but growing and deepening community connections. It stems from my own fears of having to trust that there is a community around me. That the invisible cloth of interwoven relations will keep me secure. I’m starting to understand that faith does not have to be blind though, I can put in the effort and see the effort of those around me. I can believe in something real.

I am still terrified of what it means to work intimately with someone else, in literally any capacity. But I forge ahead.
For now my art continues to be an inward journey to release the unending tension building inside of me, through a visual discussion about community; what it means to me and where I think I fit in it. It’s also my open discussion with the universe, a public display of processes. And the biggest trust exercise I could ever force myself to do.