Spinning Stories

These past few weeks have been tough. These past few years have been tough. 

I love art, I love learning about it. I love creating it. But the type of art I love is brutal. It's honest and vulnerable and based in real experiences, most of them fairly unpleasant. It's the sort of stuff I like seeing and it's the sort of stuff I love to create.

When I was about 16 I created a series of extremely personal and invasive photographs. I wasn't all that scared of putting them out there. I just did it. In fact some of the most intensely personal photos I've ever taken are on a wall in my school school, open for anyone to view. But the lack of caring wasn't bravery, it was numbness. I was numb. I was out of my head and suicidal and so so ill. I just didn't care and that wasn't good.

Then I clamped up. I created work that was completely separate from me and was so sensitive to anything being seen that I couldn't really even cope with critiques. 

Now I'm in college and I'm opening up. It's scary but it's what I want. I'm in control. The final outcome I created for this project was personal but in a different way. It alluded to things, it told parts of stories but never the ending. The stories I told were hand picked and the parts I told were chosen specifically to spell out a very particular message. 

And the funny thing is I'm just as in the dark as the audience. I let my class mates and tutor read through the stories and have no way of knowing what conclusion each of them came to. They could have it entirely wrong but they could also have it entirely right. You can try to guide an audience but at the end of the day I believe art in all it's form belongs to it's audience.

 There has to be a point you give up the control and just let people take what they need to, which might be nothing, but it might be everything. You never know.