What I could have been doing right now.

As of 13 October 2023, I should have been just starting a PHD – right now.

In Autumn 2022 was just in the final stages of submitting the proposal to the University of Leeds.

The proposal would be unconditionally accepted, but the idea began to fall apart in early 2023, when I was trying to apply for the absolutely necessary funding. It wasn’t just that in the gap created by the Pandemic, my stamina and capacity to take in the necessary academic literature had contracted almost entirely into my go-to theorist; Mark Fisher, it was also that I was trying to create something so unbelievably impossible to pull off, that I’d convinced myself I needed to create ‘genius’ to get myself out of hole I’d found my late 30s self in.

I began to see holes appear all way through the idea, and could see that my potential supervisors could see this too. I ended up admitting defeat. It was too vast a project, and I decided I needed to get away from things for a bit, winding up working 6 months away in Cumbria. 

I’m now glad I didn’t do it. No disrespect to anybody who undertakes a research-led degree, it’s just that I have realised that what I do is a compulsion, arguably an aspect of a personality disorder, and isn’t applicable to structures of research culture, no matter how much I try to twist it into a ‘lived in’, autoethnographical project.

A big part of this project, was setting up a conceptual basis to argue for the need for a grassroots space in my home town of Barnsley, and to work with @codac_community to create this, for people in the area to continue their creative pursuits in a supporting community, with the all aspect of having the bloody space to do it in!

Nothing is lost. At the least, my ideas and work in creating this will be really useful for @codac_community going forward. I have learnt a lot about myself as an artist, and am working on developing new projects for the foreseeable future. Now this break is ending, it’s time get ‘doing’ again.

Sometimes the kind of space you need to flourish doesn’t exist the world as it is. The task is to create what isn’t there. This was the shared dream that got CODAC going. Let’s hope it comes into fruition.