I’ve come to realise over a lifetime of creative practice that art, like everything else, needs periods of growth and periods of rest. Sometimes, putting the tools down and taking some time away to breathe and make space allows me to come back to creating with a renewed sense of inspiration and motivation.
Right now, I have just picked my camera up again after almost five months away. I had started to feel the desire to make something but I didn’t yet have the what and why.
This often happens when I feel the pull back towards making art – the instinct comes before the direction. The urge to create is there but the thoughts and feelings and ideas are still sitting somewhere deeper inside, present but not fully formed.
One practice that I find helpful in times like this is collating my own images into a kind of personal moodboard. Not in the traditional moodboarding sense of gathering inspiration for the next project, but as a form of checking in and letting my subconscious mind tell me where it’s at and what it’s drawn to.
A Different Kind of Reflection
I have always created from gut feel. The analysis and understanding come later, and sometimes not at all. For this reason alone, writing artist statements has always been a torturous experience, trying to wrangle together the words to explain what my inner self instinctively knows. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I have even felt brave enough to call myself a writer (I’ve actually been working professionally as a copywriter and content specialist for longer than that but marketing copy is very different to creative writing).
So, when I come to this point of finding a way back in, of gently coaxing the feelings to the surface so they may be channelled into the work, images speak louder than words.
I used to make moodboards by collecting images from other artists – photographers, painters, illustrators – but it’s easy to lose your own voice in the noise and comparison is a slippery slope. Looking at my own images allows me to reconnect with the previous versions of myself, to see what still rings true, how my voice has evolved and how I might speak to the experiences I have gathered since.
I map the images together so I can see them as a whole, the themes that emerge, the elements that I am drawn to, not just in one image but across many. This collection and cohesiveness is where the patterns emerge.
This practice isn’t about technical analysis or self-critique. I’m not looking for my strengths or weaknesses or definitive styles. Those things have their time and place but this is different. It’s a gentle entry back into creating, observing and noticing, and reteaching myself the language. It gives me a sense of clarity and grounding in the work and that gives me something to move forward with.
What I Found
Some of the elements in this most recent moodboard don’t surprise me. Minimalism, monochrome, isolated subjects and a strange sense of both anonymity and intimacy have existed in my work for a long time. What I did notice, which I hadn’t paid much attention to before, was a tendency towards structure and form. There is a strong presence of geometry – rectangles, circles and lines. I also recognise many of the compositional techniques I studied at photography college but never consciously paid a lot of attention to when shooting, thirds, repeating patterns, abstraction and frames within frames. There is also a much bigger lean back towards classical art styles, intentional posing and framing and the use of shadow and light.
Letting the Work Speak
For a long time, I considered my style to be softer, moodier and more organic. The mood is still there but it’s bolder with more contrast and more strength now. Given the difficult situations I have been living through over the last few years, I can see a sense of resilience in here that I hadn’t yet let myself acknowledge. I know from these experiences that the mind will speak the things that are deeply buried, even when we are not consciously aware of them and art is always a conduit for this.
Any kind of creative expression really requires two distinct elements – what you might say and how you might say it. In photography, this covers everything from concept and what you aim to express, to subject matter, composition, editing and how you physically create and present the work. While the message comes from somewhere deeper and more instinctive, the form it takes is what allows it to be brought forth.
This practice allows me to connect with that second part of the equation – the how. It provides a framework to move within, helping me find the right language to allow the feelings to emerge and take form.