Being an artist often means a lot of compromising around boundaries.
For artists working in media that necessitate large, costly
equipment (printmaking, sculpture, ceramics…), the same is doubly true. Artists
share studio space: maybe in adjacent “stalls” under a common roof, or at
separate tables in the same room. Artists share equipment, often with a
communal studio facility or in a college studio setting. Some of us teach at
and help maintain shared studio facilities in exchange for use of space and
equipment. Sharing is part and parcel of affording time, space, and tools to
bring one’s work into being – at least until that fairy-tale day when one has
earned sovereignty over her creative space, tools, and time – that is, when one
can afford the luxury of privacy for one’s creative
practice.
I’ll confess: I am a privacy junkie who recognizes not all artists share
her intense need for personal space. Me? I salivate over privacy; I taste its
metallic glint along the hungry hilltops of my teeth. That mountain cabin –
the one by the stream? – yanks at the woodpile of my longing like a yoked
mule to his plow. You know the cabin: it’s the one with a desk just for writing,
and a picture-window overlooking the stream (whose banks are all emerald moss
and shelf mushroom log-decay). It’s the cabin with a whole separate studio for
ceramic-and-mixed-media sculpture, with a kiln, a clay-mixing area, and plenty
of wall space for drawing. Coupled with this cabin, in this particular fantasy,
are endless strings of days I can shape to my liking – waking with a rousing
yoga session, moving on to coffee and breakfast, art-making in the morning,
writing in the afternoon, a walk at lunch, a fire after dinner…I believe
in the power of these visions.
But I’m practical, too. I embrace the reality of
my current situation [shared studio space in a community-based ceramics facility
where I also teach, plus a newish workspace in my apartment consisting of one
beautifully converted former-hospital-filing-cabinet-cum-taxidermist’s-‘butcher’s-block,
plus an easel for drawing]. I feel real gratitude for the access my current situation affords
me to kilns and clay- and glaze-mixing tools, and for the work space I am
allotted in exchange for a very reasonable amount of work.
And because I am grateful, and because I like
people, I am cagey about admitting my need for clear boundaries. I am concerned
people will think I don’t like them, that I don’t want to be around them. I fear
people will see me as arrogant for daring to want my own space in which to
create, or to teach. I worry I’ll come off as that one, hypersensitive prima
donna freak who can’t handle a little ambient noise, conversation, and foot
traffic, a little overheard music or the occasional (or frequent) interruption.
This is hard to talk about. I have avoided it like the plague (and not like “the
plaque”, which I almost just typed – a sure sign this topic makes me
nervous…).
The thing is, I get that we, as emerging artists
who can’t afford our own resources, have
to share. I get that I’m lucky to even have the chance to share access
to what I need in order to do what I want to do. And, contrary to what I secretly
fear may be coming across here as a Kardashian-grade diva-esque tone, I actually
really like people, and appreciate their habits and quirks and their desires to connect.
But the thing is, the path from, “Sharing is just part of the deal -- !” to, “Oh…sure…
O.K., w-w-what’s your question…?” [spoken to the uninvited visitor who’s (probably
totally unwittingly) crashing the party of your own hard-won creative “flow”
zone], is just, like, a Crisco-coated pig of a slope, ya know? I encounter this
grease-trap both as an artist and as an art teacher working in very communal
spaces. I had a knock-down, drag-out knuckle-fest with this boundary oil-slide
in grad school, when my six fellow grad students and two faculty and I shared
studios under the same roof, separated only by twelve-foot-tall plywood sheets
and repurposed hospital curtains (you could hear---and smell
[_microwaved_tuna_tacos_!]---everything). And lest I have been
unclear, let me restate my meaning: this battle was entirely internal.
I accepted the communal nature of my situation,
understood that each of us seeks different optimal conditions to conjure the
muse and create productively. And yet, I found myself increasingly perplexed by
what felt to me like either brash territoriality, intended to assert dominance
within the space, or blissfully ignorant thoughtlessness, on par with what one
might expect from a toddler. In either case, I felt an almost-constant sense of
bombardment from all directions and concerning all of my senses. This was when
I discovered Elaine Aron’s indispensable work, The
Highly Sensitive Person, which taught me that being an HSP was a thing (she
gave this propensity a name, in other words), and helped me learn to protect,
nurture, and honor this substantial dimension of my nature.
Several years and many beefed-up-coping-mechanisms later,
the thing I continue to come back to is, doesn’t being an artist require
tremendous sensitivity? Shouldn’t being highly sensitive not seem all that odd
or out of place as an artist sharing spaces with other artists? And yet, I
continue to encounter boundary violations that send my internal jaw crashing to
the floor in OMG-grade astonishment. I continue to feel like the odd woman out
for the degree to which cumulative boundary violations leave me feeling like a
PTSD candidate – for the degree to which these recurring violations scramble my
brain, throw me off the scent of my creative train of thought, deplete my
energy, and ultimately elicit a kind of shallow, mindless surrender. Is it, I
wonder, that many of us creative types are so wrapped up in our own vivid,
highly sensitive worlds that we can’t perceive the needs and boundaries of
others? Is it that I am just truly an aberrant outlier, whose aura is laced with
antennae as thin as milkweed wisps, in which case I’m the problem and need,
finally, to craft that full-body bubble suit I’ve joked about for half a decade?
I don’t know.
But one thing experience has taught as I’ve
slowly reclaimed sovereignty over my personal life in the past year, is that
I feel so much more deeply sane when I grant myself the right to the personal
space I crave – when, in other words, I honor my boundaries. The insidious
threads of codependency were crocheted deep into the mesh of me since childhood.
Beginning to unwind and uproot them has taken vigilant, risky work.
Codependency would have us believe that closing a door so we can think straight,
or saying “No” to something we could do for or with someone else in order to
preserve time for the thing we first and foremost need to do for our own highest good,
is selfish, and directly hurtful to any others involved. Codependency would have us
stuff down the feelings of frustration, depletion, and creative split-ends that arise
when our creative practice is fractured by repeated interruptions; it would have us roll
our eyes at these feelings, and convince ourselves that, commmmme
onnnn, so-and-so’s repeated interruptions really aren’t a big deal – they mean well –
they’re just –being them! Codependency invites us to cultivate the skill of blindness
in the face of the intensity, source, and true nature of our feelings, in exchange for a
crowd-pleasing easy-goingness that’s guaranteed to produce future emotional,
psychological, and physical geysers.
So as I ‘get it together’ bit by bit in my
personal life, I wonder about all these compromises in my creative and
professional life, and their effect, not only on my well-being, but on my ability
to hear my own creative voice. The older I get, the more I feel like a caged
lioness when this precious, precarious connection is threatened. The more I feel
motivated to craft a life that honors this delicate golden two-way antenna
without judgment.