I cannot believe how long it has been since the last blog post.

I have been avoiding a lot of the creative endeavours I keep starting. I think I just needed a break from all the intensity that can build up in life. I do enjoy the work, but the last few weeks have been a lot. In the best way possible.

Lots of personal growth, and I’ve been focusing purely on practising being present in each moment. Which for me has been incredibly difficult to do, but I am already seeing great progress.

Recently I finished my latest piece titled ‘Old Skin’. I’ve been navigating ways to conceptualise and provide context for the work behind the piece. Originally started work on Old Skin at around the mid/end point of the travels.

The trip definitely signified a turning point in my life in many significant ways. It was something I had been preparing for for a long time, leading up to the trip there was this recurring idea of being in a liminal space, a place between worlds.
It can feel like a strange purgatory-like space, looking back it feels a lot like being stuck, uncertainty, like a brief moment in time when letting go of the old identity has happened but there is nothing to fill its place.
A consuming event that feels timeless, neither bad nor good just a vast space. I like to think of it now as a new beginning, with foundations ready to be built upon. It didn’t feel like that in the moment.
 Jump to the last half of the trip, I was free from the ambiguity of that liminal feeling. I felt a new beginning this time, full of joy and optimism. I had been exploring themes of identity, masking, and also having a hard look at the subconscious habits I had accepted as fact. I felt like instead of these masks I was donning when needed, I realised I was able to regrow, shedding dead skin. 

It became a show of growth, a display to myself what I had learned. 

While attached to the masks I had been working on earlier in the year, it was a visual representation of those masks crumbling away, but not instantly. It’s taken a long time, there was a lot of resistance, it’s this identity I’ve been attached to for years. “Cellular clinging”, I look forward to writing about this in more detail. Despite having a clear context to convey this work, I found myself coming back to it unsure if it was complete. 

Looking for some kind of goal post to set and reach, but coming up empty every time, and I would just dive in and feel my way through until I couldn’t anymore. This idea of finishing a piece came up over and over, and I wasn’t ready to face it head-on. I would hide behind some idea of what real art might be, how real artists know when it’s finished. 

The other day I was trying to redesign my website, I think I convinced myself I had to have it a certain way. Simply, I was avoiding doing some work and creating new fake work for me. I managed to convince Carolyn to help me try and resign my website from scratch. She came across The creative independent. It grabbed both of us. Such a cool site, she read through some of the posts while I chipped away at Old Skin. I knew it would come in handy later on, and so I bookmarked it. 

Back to today, writing this blog, I’m stumped on what to write about. There’s been so much that’s happened: back to work, picked up some of the film, catching up with friends, trying to get my routine back in action. It’s been a lot, all great, and I’ve been having a fantastic time, which only makes it harder to pick something. Today specifically, I was sitting down at the table when I looked over and saw Old Skin sitting there. I purposely perched it upright on display for me to sit and glance over and decided if it’s done or not. After a few days I decided to pull up The Creative Independent and have a look and see if there’s anything that might be helpful. 

Sure enough, I stumbled across an interview with Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos by Sammy Maine. “On embracing the idea that nothing is ever finished” and there were some really interesting questions and very insightful answers. It is definitely worth a read. I’ll summarise the part I got the most out of. 

Maine asks, “How do you know when something’s finished? Do you ever wish you could go back and change a piece you previously released?”
And Kline’s response is very comprehensive, stating that “I don’t think anything’s ever finished.”

The concept of art never truly being finished, how it’s more of a spectrum with an initial idea and subsequent iteration of being valid.

I went away for a bit and thought about that response.
An idea can form in many different pieces of art, I thought to myself. Now related to ‘Old Skin’, starting from masks, something I initially attached to. Masks gave me a way to safely explore what I couldn’t before, a new way for me to observe my life, the situation within my life, and identity. 

Feeling trapped and held hostage to different identities, predetermined by my past experiences. Forced to don one or another.
Fitting into these roles other people have dictated. It was an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. Disguised as destiny. 

The words that come to mind are from Greentea Peng’s track titled ‘I AM (Reborn)’ and it goes, “I am not who I was yesterday, so how could you know me?”

I remember listening to this one day after I had an extremely frustrating conversation with someone, it was stuck in my mind because it felt like a trap, I was placed into this label that they branded me with, basically saying I cannot change because of my past behaviour.

This piece might never be finished and I kind of love that.
It’s not the same medium as music but in a way the masks were the initial idea, that led me down this path to freedom. Learning more about myself along the way. Art is incredibly powerful, if you open up and allow yourself to believe in change. 

I will attach the current version of ‘Old Skin’ below.

Peace and Love
-Grin