I’m 40 years old in roughly 20 days.
When it comes to a life lived through formalities, and rites of passage, there has been no life to speak of.
Forgive me if this sounds like wallowing, it’s because Xmas time is really genuinely hard at the best of times. Seeing photos of couples, or families in xmas pyjamas, no matter the reality, compounds any suspicions I have that I’ve made a mess of my life.
For even if one has justifiable disdain to the conservative simulacra we’re encouraged to perform to show the wealth of our personal lives, if it’s the only boat one can sail on, then it must be boarded at the pain of having no boat at all – no life at all.
As I reach 40 I feel as trapped as ever behind a glass screen, which no matter how difficult I find to get past, how the frustration has nearly brought me to the brink so many times, it can cannot help but sound like “excuses, excuses” in any utterance made.
Social media has made life so profoundly worse that if it wasn’t so intentionally addictive, I wonder if those most responsible would be behind bars. Techniques that were once reserved for roadside billboards and TV commercial breaks are now employed to mediate relations between friends and associates.
You may say, ‘so what?’ – but once something so fundamental as a social animal connecting with others of its same species is captured and filtered by techniques that are designed to create a sense of lack, or envy, in the viewer, then there can be no doubt its impact on creating a society with a loneliness problem.
It’s embarrassing to say one may be lonely, and offensive to the many people who see me as a friend, but in all due respect this doesn’t prevent loneliness.
We all know xmas can be a lonely time. And it’s hitting me hard knowing I’m reaching one of the most important marker points of middle age in early January: turning 40.
I’ve seen so many manifestations of successive age groups, lost and found on the route to a full-bodied adulthood that paves way for a dignified death years down the line. Mortality isn’t mortality when no rites of passage are passed through, to you merely remain in limbo, shouting louder and louder, banging on the glass, but nobody can understand what your saying across a widening void of comprehension
The mute horror of seeing life’s landscapes inverted through the ghosts who, to everyone else, remain unnoticeable in the shadows, seeing your future reflection as they traipse between shoppers and revellers, trying not to be noticed by any judgemental, gossipy soul.
Sorry for this.
I admit I’m catastrophising.
But, historically, by the time my birthday comes around in early January, I’m psychologically on my knees. I’m feeling a lot of panic at the moment, about what kind of state I’ll be in come January.
I certainly don’t need any emotional auto-correct applied to my thoughts.
Life is hard at the moment. I do not mean for this to be self-indulgent, but I need to remind myself of what I’ve done in times like this.
This is a list of 20 things I have done that I feel most proud of during the last 20 years, including 20 of my favourite drawings at the end.
1.Ooon Badger (2006)
These aren’t the original recordings from the Ooon Badger CD I started handing out to my mates in Spring 2006. But it does contain some of them.
I’m specifically proud of ‘Ooon Badger’ as it was originally an alteration of my name on my school student planner, as a kind of piss-take I was on the receiving end of. But in 2006 I felt enough spring in my step to turn it on its head, and turn Ooon Badger into a zany alter ego.
I’d had a bad period of depression, which I dealt with by shaving my head, which oddly helped, and writing the most silly songs I’d ever written with the help of a cheap keyboard I bought off Barnsley market. I wrote all 10 songs in 10 days, and wrote the last song on this album in 10 minutes. Really proud of that.
I actually made friends with new people due to this album!
2. 2006 – Barnsley town hall and Emley Moor Mast Myspace profiles.
My middle year at the university centre in Barnsley was a bit of write off. Nobody was feeling the new building, and some of us sat discontent, wasting our academic hours on the learning centre computers.
Our ‘messing around’ would have been seen as a legitimate art project if we were Goldsmiths students, and not sat in Barnsley town centre, unaware that Goldsmiths even existed.
My friend created a Myspace account for the glamour model Jodie Marsh, which in-spite of contemporary ethical issues in doing so, was an act of genius, in the fact that he got all these random blokes from around Europe contacting him [her] asking her to come to their house(s). At which point my friend decided to change Jodie Marsh into ‘M Bison’, a character from the Street Fighter game. All Jodie’s admirers were massively confused.
I, on the other hand created Myspace profiles for both Barnsley town hall (male) and Emley Moor mast (female) who were in a ‘complicated’ relationship with each other.
3. 2004 – 2007. All the rest of the music
Between 2004 and 2008 I wrote probably 100’s of songs. At least 50 that I believe are still redeemable, if the day came to redevelop them.
People thought I was a joke, a bloke with a painted guitar, singing nasally, in an area in the grips of Libertines/Strokes-inspired indie bands – to the point that the NME described Yorkshire as the epicentre for these kind of bands.
I don’t know if this eventually got to me, along with the fact that my visual art was getting more attention, but in the autumn of 2008 I wrote around ten songs and then stopped, more or less indefinitely.
Some of these songs are from 2008, and some from an earlier period.
5. 2008 – Contrast, group show at Hive Gallery, Elsecar.
In November 2008 I did my first proper show, if that’s the right way of saying it, as in co-curated with a group of friends, and the owners of the now-gone Hive Gallery. Myself, and my friends Richard Kitson and Bradley Sharp opened this exhibition on the same night for an exhibition of works by the famous pop artist Peter Blake in the larger room.
Unfortunately I never really had the resources to take the sculptural element of the work I was developing further, although there may be another chance in the future.
I miss Hive Gallery.
6. (2008) ‘The Sprawl’
Drawing installation around my old bedroom door. The only reason I had such stamina for this work is because I was such a good spell, where I was in creative flow, largely because I felt at home in the time, and not chasing it, since ever after. I genuinely grieve for this part of my creative life.
The original sketch (3rd drawing along) was equally as memorable. Caffeine rush on the train home from Leeds (the composition is definitely Leeds-inspired), and just started scribbling down the composition in a manic manner that I would feel probably feel embarrassed to express in public now.
7. 2009 The Alpha Forest installation
I think I tried to upstage the aforementioned drawing, by making something even more ambitious. Unfortunately I began to lack the space and resources to work on such a scale there-on-after. My drawings remained big, but these drawings were huge – inspired by my first couple of years working front of house at the nearby sculpture park, but unaware how much room I’d actually need to make more of these.
This was also my first articulation of the struggles I was experiencing due to the competitive nature of our society. I was beginning to form a critique of a competitive individualism, which, as I saw, contradicted its own culture aims, by pushing people further towards conformity and mundanity.
8. 2010 The Tide of society
My first solo exhibition at the short-lived 433 gallery in Kelham Island in Sheffield, was a big thing in my little world. To exhibit in Sheffield may sound small fry to many, but I did my degree in my home town, my knowledge of the art world was expanding due to the working at the sculpture park, but it took until exhibiting Sheffield for people to actually start taking me even mildly seriously. The concept for this exhibition was an all-compassing show, which included an early naive attempt at self-publishing books.
9. 2011. Globalsapiens/Pandemic
In 2011 I was probably at the peak of a more ‘full-frontal’ kind of politicisation. 2011 was also a year of global political awaking, from uprisings in North Africa, to big large scale protest strategies around the most powerful financial cities. Despite the legacy of this period, at that time it felt like something big was just around the corner. It was terrifying and promising in equal measure. It was before the dual waves of gentrification and austerity turned our cities into Schizo-scapes of deep disassociation.
Maybe I strayed too far, severing my older creative needs; the fun in making that big serious projects often cannot tap into, and maybe I lost good friends in the process.
I was heavily involved in both Globalsapiens and Pandemic, two group shows in Sheffield that overlapped somewhat. The debates, arguments, ideas that were flung about in this period would perhaps be the most important to the work and larger projects I would go on to create thereon-after.
10. 2013 Now Then Publication
Now Then is a free city-wide independent magazine for culture in Sheffield (although I’m not certain it’s still physically distributed – not seen it for ages). In 2013 I was asked if I’d like my work to be featured in the magazine.
More people know about my work from seeing it in the May 2013 edition than for anything else I have ever done since.
11. 2015 – present. The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe.
From very early 2015 to the present, I have been involved in an artist collective, that at times has remained so true to its aims, that it has merely been spectrally present around the meat and potatoes of all things ‘art’.
Even though this may not have been the goal we consciously aimed for at the point of the collective’s inception, it certainly feels like the perfect artistic gesture, where manifestation of an idea often leads to its sanitisation under the spotlights of an age where artists must bend and contort themselves in order to do necessary box ticking, to the extent that the truth of their art becomes a lowly secondary afterthought.
Aside from all this, there were some great performative and participatory projects we undertook with the collective, which more than anything solidified close friendships, where we could rely on one another for necessary conversations in pubs and cafes that we felt nobody else would entertain.
12 ‘The Prisoners of reason’
In 2015 the academic writer S. M. Amadae, contacted me out of the blue telling me she was a big fan of my drawings and would like to use the drawing ‘The Logic of Neoliberalism’ for her upcoming book ‘Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy.
It was a real boost for my confidence, as by this point I was feeling tired from what felt like years of unsuccessfully trying to get shows/works in the ‘right kind of’ exhibitions – if you know you know.
13. 2016. Fighting for Crumbs
It’s taken me well over half a decade to be proud of this project.
It did me a lot of damage. I never took on any DIY project anything of this scale again. I could not understand how to apply what I did, what ideas I had to adhere to the available funding pots. So I did everything off my own back.
The project was a collective idea, but I took the lead with it, stretching it conceptually and geographically fit 2 cities; Wakefield and Sheffield (which wasn’t too difficult conceptually as both areas had similar industrial pasts and struggles). But then we were invited to take this exhibition to the upcoming ‘World Transformed’ event, held by Momentum, in Liverpool.
In hindsight, we did great, but I was so jaded and burn out by it all, and I never let my artistic ideas get that close to political projects ever again. I think art needs breathing space from political goals, no matter how urgent those goals may seem.
14. (2018 – 2020) Wall, I/A Eulogy for a lost decade
During the MA I was undertaking at Leeds, fortunately in the years preceding anything called ‘coronavirus’ I came to a realisation that I could adapt myself and work I made to the research structures that underpin life of all academics, including visual artists.
No matter how many books I read, how intellectualised my work could be, I could never reach a place where I could develop a ‘research focus’, from where I could use words such as ‘exploring themes of’, the language that oils the access routes into the arts.
It always felt like I was tying to the next stage but was blocked by some invisible wall, a sorted on inner wall that retarded my larger transcendental concepts back into self-consumed cries for an escape from myself.
Wall, I, was my response: a polite middle finger to what felt like an autocratic set of rules ofnhow to bean artist; to be interested in a research focus , yet simultaneously disintestered, seemingly, in their own truths, their own mortality, an awareness of such which is most surely the trigger for all artist impulses. I did this by scripting a film to 12 pop songs I co-wrote with an old school friend, Lee Garforth.
But, it wasn’t just a middle-finger exercise, it was probably the most important project I ever undertook. And I feel like it got its due in Doncaster, of all places, in a space run by ‘The New Fringe’. Surrounded by drawings from my last ten years, some which had never had any public exposure, this feels like the best presentation of my work in its totality to date.
15. (2020) The Bradgate Band
In March 2020 I started a job working with adults with learning disabilities, delivering art workshops. 2 weeks later the entire country was in its first ever lockdown since the days of the bubonic plague.
Nobody knew what the hell was going on. I ended up working temporarily in the residential house of a group of adult males who would usually have come to the day service.
Although i was expected to keep them entertained/help them cope with the bizarre circumstances, by doing art projects, I never expected to undertake what ended up being a make-shift album-making residency.
Writing songs about things these 4 residents liked/got up to, turning their favourite sayings into song lyrics, by the end of it we had an album!
I genuinely see it is not only one of the most fun projects I’ve been involved in, but one of the best!
16. (2020) “It’s War, then!
This video, using my own living self portrait as a locus for the internalisation of the divides caused by online culture wars, I ended up probably making one of the best one off works I’ve ever made.
17. (2020) Fundraiser for Barnsley Rough Sleepers project.
As winter and the second lockdown of 2020 creeped up, I decided to ask fellow artists from the Barnsley area to help me set up an art auction for a charity set up to help people experiencing really difficult lives in the town.
We raised over 2000 pounds in what felt a dual positive outcome, of helping some of the most vulnerable in our town, whilst also showcasing a good section of the town’s visual artists.
18. (2022/23) A Radical Redemption/Back to Normalism
These exhibitions left a lot to be desired; I was often working in solitude and could have really have used some critical support before the exhibitions were up and over in developmental sense.
However, some of the features, the elements where I used introspection to speak of some of the most problematic issues in contemporary society, as well as combining sculpture with my map-making, were big leaps forward for the future.
I just need to keep a level head on me at the moment, as despite all this progress, and projects in the next couple of years, I feel very lost and at risk of scrapping all the hard work I’ve put into everything along the way.
19. (2023)- Stories from the outside
Stories from the outside are a new series of texts I’ve been developing that link together some very important things about my life with the landscape that surrounds me, in a way I am actually really proud of. Fingers-crossed this is the start of something much bigger.
20. (2006- present) Drawings
And here is simply 20 of the all time favourite of my large scale drawings.
Thanks
John B Ledger 