I admittedly don’t use this blog as much as I used to. 10 years ago it was an ongoing projection of political and philosophical and personal wranglings. This was at the very precipice of a decade that wouldn’t only come to be defined by our immersion into the social media feeds, but also in how those feeds, and the algorithms that guide them, would come to somewhat define us, and what we believed.
Perhaps it was the emotional exhaustion of arguments, and sometimes being remotely pathologised for the honesty around my mental state in relation to a larger societal context, or perhaps it was just down to my sheer inability to hold a train of thought on one specific topical issue amidst what I’ve heard been called “the shitstorm”, but I gradually stopped seeing it as an effective tool, both for the sake of my own health, and for the health of my friendships.
Nonetheless I think this became a new challenge for my art: how could I more carefully work with the same things, thoughts, that I’d usually project, in a ever-more considered manner, especially when it came to deliverance?
2021 has, perhaps, like for so many people, been defined by the feeling of ageing more rapidly. Something about the conditions of the last year that cannot be explained away as simply as a product of isolation (as its persisted once we could socialise still) have made many people speak of how they feel much much older now. On a personal level I went into this pandemic in the mid 30s, and can now see 40 on the horizon.
2021 has been defined by begrudging acceptances. I started the year in a full time job – now it’s part time. And although I now enjoy the job far more, which is, in the grand scheme of work, a pretty good workplace, I have come to an awareness that, for whatever cluster of reasons, mostly down to mental health, I’m unable to work full time, and under a certain amount of work-load pressure. Fortunately, for the time being, I am able to live part time, and I have far more time to take my art from strength to strength again, but, when it comes to wanting to build a life for myself, in the world we’ve got, and with nearing 40, a lot of acceptances about what possibilities are left, have been bitter pills to swallow. However, I’ll never properly accept things as they are, and some may say this is my problem, but it’s also who I am; if somebody says “things are just like this, accept it”, I’m more inclined to fight it than before. One thing I’m fighting from now on is the feelings of shame I internalise around accusations of negativity (in all its shades of grey); one person’s negative is another person’s one bit of sunlight in an enclosed cell.
Nonetheless, without this turning too much into an indulgent blog of internal monologues, I’ll say more about my year in art, which has been productive, if not directly so.
I’ll start by looking at my drawings, which are large projects themselves, but have certainly been thinner on the ground this year, as I leant more towards video:
“Endure The Night of This World”
Perhaps this type of work is why I have been seen as making unremittingly bleak work. But fundamentally, this work is about the turning point in the dead of night, when everything feels over, it could be because something new is about to begin.
Hipster Pyschosis
This is more outwardly angry work I’ve made in a long time; anger not an individuals but at a culture fixed to a story that is evermore removed from reality in a post-covid landscape.
The main focus of the year has been video work; it began with a “Inner Monologue: a 2020 review, which I think is pretty self explanatory, albeit incredibly complex to pull off in a small studio space, with limited resources at the height of the lockdowns.
The masked character, an amalgamation of things I saw as iconic of a specifically “English trauma” (a medieval plague doctor mask, and an overworked office worker, merging with a 21st century budget delivering chancellor) has become an avataristic-vessel, through which I could perform a lot of video performances, often in particular focussing on the state of the English soul, whilst also being a semi-self portrait.
This work was called ‘Compulsive Obedience”
Video work, I believe helps translate more dimensions of myself, the maker, than perhaps drawings, and especially writing can do. Because, although it is, dark, I do have humorous, albeit ridiculous humorous, qualities – often developed due to compulsive people pleasing, but nonetheless aspects of my persona that have often been missed by older works.
This was followed by “Looking for The Exit”
A Private Civil War was an attempt to mix my drawing with video work. Perhaps due to the nature of collating fleeting utterances of a critical inner monologue, and writing them into a script, it was the toughest work to make this year, and by that definition probably defines the year more than the other works.
So all in all, to para-quote the child in the car on the first Jurassic Park, “I’m back where I started”, regarding more straightforward, normative, although still often desired life achievements. But artistically I feel like I’m back in my drivers seat, which is a good thing.
John B Ledger 