Blog 5

I have recently read A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland. Now in her sixties, Maitland has spent the last twenty years or so trying to find silence. She has finally found it, of sorts, living in a remote cottage in the countryside of Scotland. 

In the book, Maitland writes extensively about her research and knowledge on the subject of silence, what it is, what it feels like, what it can or cannot be. She stayed on a remote island, travelled into the desert, lived in a forest and moved house twice before finding the silence that she needed for her.

Interestingly, Maitland tells the story of Barbara Erakko Taylor who brought an RV, travelled all across America, only to find her hermitage when she got back home. 

I thought that I wanted silence and realise that I don’t want it all the time, but definately to be part of my existence.

Maitland describes two types of silent retreat. There is the creative who needs silence in order to ‘find oneself’, through creative work, protected from the distraction of society and everyday life. The opposite is the hermit who needs silence to empty out the soul. Both seek individual fulfillment with one supporting the ego and the other breaking it down. 

As a writer and creative, Maitland finds that she needs both types of silences, in order to exist and to build herself up or break herself down. She finds it a struggle to support both, and I feel this too. 

The problem for me is that my brain is not silent. It is loud and active. 

My artworks may have a quality of silence about them, when they are being made and when they are on display, but my drawings are full of activity when you get up close to them.  

In 2006, I presented a single dot on an A1 size piece of paper. It was a fully considered, measured drawing. I was interested in Claes Oldenburg’s comment that ‘drawing is a mark that activates a space’.  As an experiment, I made one single tiny mark on paper, to see if I responded to it. The drawing hung in my studio for six months. I looked at the dot often. It had definately altered the paper, but I didn’t draw into it once. That was the work. 

These days, I have to fill the whole paper up, leaving no gaps unturned, every space drawn. The complete opposite to the dot drawing in 2006. 

In 2008 I wrote a brief saying that I wanted to ‘de-clutter’ my life - mentally, emotionally and practically. It was exciting, refreshing, yet scary, all at the same time. By the end of that year, Shawn and I had decided to sell up and go travelling. Seriously down grading our home, from a three bedroom house to a van, we had a mega clearout. Almost everything had to go and I felt at peace with the whole event. 

As I look round the van, I think it is time to have another ‘de-clutter’. I find myself keep making the same kind of drawings and I need some new processes, a new approach. Perhaps by pairing things down even more, reducing my physical and therefore mental clutter, it will help me to move on.