Making art is about being vulnerable (before your material, before your audience). You have to place yourself in front of the material and allow it to say what wants/needs to be said filtered through your particular sensibilities of accidental origins, influences, thoughts. That’s an opening up process and thus always difficult. For years I’ve had a newspaper cutting on my pinboard – the point of a pinboard, is, I think, to pin up things of current concern, current interest, bills you need to remember to pay, receipts for things you’ve bought, wise aphorisms, things which catch your eye … but the key word is CURRENT. I’ve never managed to do that – I like the things pinned to my pinboard so much I never replace them, keep them up to date; I’ve got stuff on there from, oh, 1994 .. anyway, where was I? …and one of the cuttings says:

“You’re stuck writing something until the point where you go, to hell with it – I’ll tell the truth“

Liz Lochhead

‘Truth’ does not come in a tidy, ideologically-approved bundle and it can’t be constrained in advance: it exists only here, now

The other cutting says:

“It’s hard enough to write. I’ve had my mother, nuns and priests telling me what I shouldn’t do. I want to be free.”

Edna O’Brien

So, the necessity to write what is, not what one is supposed to.

“If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution”

Emma Goldman