14 years ago, I’d just turned 24 and left university. My art was, kind of, blossoming, and taking in many new approaches. As things progressed, the financial crash happened, and who knows how much these events change the course of our individual lives, but I feel it’s safe to say that I went one way, and although I continued making work I valued intensely, I got lost in time.
It’s not with self pity that I say this, just an honest assessment, which struck me as I walked around the nearby city of Leeds, still kind of expecting the shops of 2008 to be in place (Borders the book store, the old cafes). It’s not so much about “keeping up with the times”; for one, it’s hard to decipher what these times are anyway, as 2008 was at the precipice of a communications tech/social media boom, that would, no doubt, transform our collective experience of time away from a 20th century experience of time centred around Western media platforms and analogue technologies (and that’s me being kind to the shift).
But nonetheless, even as my art practice has tried to channel this (dis)Geist, I have also been largely dishonest (to myself) about why I put everything into it to the extent I did. I felt like I got stuck at some point back in 2008, and even while I may not have wanted to settle down, and do all those sorts of things, I think it’s fair to say I began using my work, as a ‘catch up’, an ongoing document of proof; proof that I wasn’t a failure, I wasn’t irrelevant, covering up the painful winces I’d get when even my most stowaway of friends would eventually settle down, and have kids etc. I promised to myself that it was ‘time to learn to live’ at the start of 2020, and, well, we all know how the course of 2020 went. But despite this, all learned is how hard it was to press activate on a different life setting.
So, just out of self-kindness I just wanted to share all of this work, (drawing, map-making, film-making, installations ) to look back on, from 2008 to now, in as much of a chronological order as is possible.
John B Ledger 