I make really bad art.
I used to make bad art then I stopped making bad art and now I started making bad art again.
I stopped about 15 years ago.
I stopped because I had other things to do, like running a business and doing lots of commercially creative work.
I stopped because the art I make is not built for the algorithm, not particularly impressive and when I’m making the art, I don’t feel like documenting the journey of making bad art.
I stopped because I didn’t understand how stopping was a travesty.
About a year ago, I pulled myself away from the Solitaire game I was playing or the YouTube hole I had descended into and looked at myself. It took me a moment to emerge from the 4th space, that digital Land of the Lost that I had increasingly been falling into since the beginning of the pandemic, the place I deserved to wallow in because “I’m tired” or “I worked really hard today” or “I need to stay relevant” or “the world is hard and I need my hit of distraction.”
I remember where I was laying (our couch)
I remember the light (early dusk)
I remember what I was wearing (sweatpants)
And I remember thinking to myself, “What the FUCK am I doing?”
I thought about the hour or two I had lost to the scroll that day. And the ones in the days before. And thought ahead to the hours I would lose tomorrow and next day if I didn’t do something. I realized that I was giving myself away to the jackasses that have engineered these platforms precisely to suck us in until we don’t recognize ourselves anymore, their riches suckled off of our souls.
We live in the woods now.
I grew up in the woods.
Being in the woods now makes me think about being a child in the woods, a feral childhood. I had more freedom than probably was legal and I spent most of my time alone in the woods amongst imaginary friends and cawing birds. I was always making things - cardboard box space shuttles and paper mache planets and rock patterns and forts out of old wood piles and fallen trees. It was a wild childhood and like many of us, it was a deeply creative childhood.
In my twenties, I used to come home from work and make shitty collages. I used to write fucking awful poetry. I would travel the world and feel all the romanticism of a new open landscape and the discomfort and thrill of being a place that’s not your home and getting by with universal gestures and luck. In 2008, when I was 29, I bought an iPhone and a few years later I opened my Instagram account. I haven’t made many shitty collages or written a lot of fucking awful poetry since and travel is so much easier now with Google Translate and Apple Pay and distractions to make the wait in a train station pass quickly. Those hours of making and feeling and being in the world got sucked away into the pixeled vortex.
Lying on that couch, I realized that I had given away the most wild and feral and crazy and beautiful impulses in me and replaced them with an engineered addiction that, more often than not, deadened me. Emotions that flit with every swipe versus feelings that sink in and marinate, a headline understanding of many things but no deep contemplation about much at all. I felt horror - what have I done? What did I give up? And why did I let them take it from me?
We have a barn where we live now. The guy that owned the place before us was a tinkerer and in this barn are workstations and walls lined with drawers and hooks for hanging whatnot and the whole effect is a wonderland of nooks and leftover screws and nails and tape and the feeling that you can do something, anything with your hands. I’ve commandeered a corner of this barn from the dust and mice and returned to where I was 20 years ago, making shitty collages and - here’s a new one - miniature sheep made out of trash.
When Sinead O’Connor died, I sat on the couch as I scrolled through the announcement, barely registering an “oh that’s too bad” before flicking away to the next cluster of pixels and their seductive glow.
But a few weeks later, after watching a documentary about her on a flight, I came home to the barn, blasted her albums for hours and worked on a shitty collage. Her belief, her rage, her fight, her hope rattled that barn, and as I cut and glued and growled and sang and glued and cut some more, an explosion of color and jagged edges and sharp angles taking shape on the page in front of me, I ruminated on her life, her bravery, my life, bravery I’ve seen in others, what colors make me feel brave, how I can be more brave, how I hope she is in peace, how she’s a patron saint to many of us, how to carry on her truth… ruminations that I didn’t come even close to a few weeks earlier during my flick-through of her obituary.
I felt an ancient energy stirring in me that afternoon, the stirring of thoughts deeply thought and feelings deeply felt. Every cut of paper, every nudge while considering where a piece should go, every swipe of glue… time slows, time expands, the soul can unclench and breathe. I felt a wildness and an instinctual sense of self that I haven’t felt in decades, feelings that harken back to the truths found in my childhood woods when all I had was my mind and what I would make.
Making bad art is an act of reclamation.
Unfettered creativity is an act of resistance.
It creates a protective space around us, a guard against the forces that woo us to spend, to consume, to get sucked in so that we shed data that gets turned into others’ gold.
Creation that isn’t shown or sold or made for social consumption but rather creation that is made because making is vital, that creation keeps us free.
It reminds us who we really are, it shows us the way to that which is beautiful and verdant inside.
I don’t know what your bad art is. It might be singing at the sunrise or collecting rocks or making birdhouses out of tin cans or decoupaging thrifted vases.
Whatever it is, do it.
And do it often.
Brilliant. Thanks Heidi, I needed this slap around the chops.
Absolutely loved this and felt it deeply. Thank you for sharing.