You are an artist

Even if you do it at home, for no profit

A crochet workshop I hosted at home

You are an artist, even if you don’t sell art. You are an artist even if you have a part time job that’s not making art. You are an artist, even if you have a FULL time job that’s not making art.

We evolved in groups of 100 - 500 people. We didn’t evolve watching just a few people out of 8 billion be considered “artists”. In every small neighbourhood or tribal network there will be multiple artists, because diversity is an evolved trait and artisanship is necessary for communities to clothe and house themselves; to make vehicles, crockery, fun things to look at, cool things to stick in our ears, and books!

My studio desk

I’ve never called myself an artist. I never felt legitimate. Some of that was the advent of “branding”, and how for a while it seemed creatives had to be only one thing — or whatever could fit into 150 characters. Some of that, was that my grandad was an artist — a truly talented one, whose paintings hung in the Royal Academy of Art.

My art has always been more like craft. Collage in school, crochet with Nan, zines in Los Angeles.

I attended DecolonArt, a fabric craft workshop, last year, and went back to the same workshop series for events with paper crafts and zines. Anika founded DecolonArt to decolonise the arts and empower resistance. The workshop series is coming to an end but you might just be able to catch the last one. I realised: Zines are being made in London. Collage art, once weird and scrappy and not-art, is now, again, as it was in the 90s, when I grew up, embraced as bold, anti-corporation, independent, gentle, representative of how a mind works, a way to discuss colliding images in culture.

I went to the workshop, and others like it, largely because of my baby loss. I always would have enjoyed them, but I grew up with a parent who grew up in poverty, and have often held back from spending money on unnecessary things such as self-expression outside my work. After loss, I know to take better care of myself or face difficult consequences. Crafting is something my kids and I would have done, and did do, a lot together. I crafted with my daughter—we made her clothes in our evenings together, and, after she was born, hand and foot prints and casts and a second hat for her head, which was larger than I had predicted. When I craft now, I am with her, with them. I get to be their mother in a different way to when I read to them, sit by them, or grieve them—all different ways I experience being their mum.

Another thing, that doesn’t feel like an old theme returning, but an entirely new idea, is that I’m really into softness, which I never saw written about before 2024. Then, I found

Andrea Gibson

’s poetry,

Margeaux Feldman

of Softcore Trauma’s memes, and

Clementine Morrigan

’s writings, posted to Instagram, which in their own specific ways were trauma-informed and soft and resonated with what happened to me and how I feel now. (All are on Substack — click their names to view their pages.) Softness is not “self-care”, which honestly always sounded to me like capitalism’s way of blaming us for being tired from overwork, but being so gentle and kind and loving and soft with yourself and others. It’s really helped me this past year, and it’s something I want to bring into my own art practice…

…Yes! ART practice! I’m going to call myself an artist because I make art! I make it all the time! I crochet, I doodle, I collage, I journal, I go to workshops, I sew, I take photographs, and I sometimes photocopy cool things in weird ways. I love to try new creative activities and techniques. Over the new year holiday, I knitted for the first time in 20 years. I don’t always finish it, I’m not always “good” at it, whatever that means… but I make art. I am an artist.

Perhaps I can bring that art into my “work” or perhaps it’s better to say, it will be part of my practice. Whether I count it as work or not, I’d like to call myself an artist. Just doing so makes me feel more creative. As if some additional value has been given to the craft I do at home. And I wonder whether that additional value — taking myself and my process of art-making more seriously — will result in me finishing more, doing more, growing more, learning more.

I know lots of my readers have their own artistic activities they enjoy. So, remember, you are an artist. Even if all you do is think artistically ~ a little differently.

A particular Instagrammer and Substacker really inspired this way of seeing my creative work. I first followed

Kayla s

on Instagram, because I enjoyed her crochet work. At the time, she was crocheting dresses and hats from scrap yarn. I loved the colours she used, how she seemed not to worry about quirks in the design, and her sustainable choice to use scraps — and made a scrap hat for myself inspired by her work. After the hat I made for my daughter, and one for my first loss baby to pass on to their little siblings one day, I think it was my first adult hat (this was September 2023; I’d been following her work since earlier that year). I also loved how she didn’t use patterns — for me, making up designs and figuring out where to increase and decrease is part of the beauty of crocheting clothes! I don’t mind unraveling a hat if it’s not working, and the tops I had already made at the time were “designed” by wriggling them on with a hook still attached at various stages of their manufacture. I recently took a critical look at the work of some of my favourite artists on Instagram in my journal. What I noticed about Kayla’s posts, that I hadn’t paid attention to before, was that she shares not only art that she sells via drops, exhibitions, or commissions, but art that she makes for her family and home, too. Whenever I’ve been imbibing her feed, I never ascribe more value to what is for sale than to what is for cherishing. I really liked that. It was this that made me realise, “I could do that too.”

A cyanotype I made in a www.marinacyanotypes.com workshop

Welcome to my newly retitled Substack. In dark times, thank you for being here to help me let the light in. I’d genuinely love to hear what you do ~ or would like to do! ~ artistically. I’m really interested in people and am so excited when I hear about their/your lives! I’d love this to be a space for community, particularly because I’m moving away, and eventually off, social media. Please share what you do in the comments below.

Things I used today that were handmade by myself or family:

-my scarf (thanks, Mum!)

-mosaic tile coaster

-crocheted bag

-t-shirt (by my friend, Coralie)

Take a look at my recharged Substack:

it has a new title,

new sections on Baby Loss (you have to sign up to this if you’d like to receive them. To do so, click here, and then on “Manage Subscription”)

and Journaling,

plus, new pages with info on my novels

and on my development editing and mentoring practice.

Imbibing, currently:

Lana’s “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?” for long writing stretches,

Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter on Netflix. TW: child loss/abuse of women by men

The Rachel Maddow podcast, posting daily in the first 100 days of this presidency

and strong black coffee from my housemate’s AirPress.