John B Ledger

“This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

“Without examples, without models
I began to believe voices in my head,
That I am a freak, that I am broken,
That there is something wrong with me,
That I will never lovable. Years later,
I find the courage to admit that I am transgender,
And that does not mean that I am unlovable.
This world that we imagine in this room
Might be used to gain access to other rooms,
Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

I’m slightly catatonic, beaten by a really low time, yet equally I can see something crystal clear, something never clear in the low-level panic state of the cold hard realism, down there, below.

I don’t want to come down, down from ‘the tops’, which, however inhospitable and dangerous, always seem to offer a portal to somewhere else.

Nor the night roads which eventually lose their intolerability to walkers, and become astral runways- removed from the flat destinations at every turn off, by every step into the trance.

I’ve kept looking at the photo above, one I took as I scaled the steep inclines of a river source. I wanted to fall in love with the photo, because the photo is of an idea, and idea of place, a place I wish I could remain, a portal to another realm where my physical presence seems to belong, not tangled in the icy chest stabs of ‘wrongness’.

How did I get here?

The photo is of knarled oak trees that cover a river source near the Woodhead Pass area of Dark Peak, a river that eventually goes on to help form the infamous river Mersey.

Living with the physical presence of the Dark Peak hills shapeshifting with the distant clouds, over the pennine foothills, I would walk mile upon mile up to them in a desperate period in early adulthood, with this superstitious need to believe that they would take me away to another place.

This feeling would often carry itself over to the area at the other side of the hills, momentarily second-guessing Greater Manchester and Liverpool as a Post-industrial Yorkshire in an alternative reality: similar, but weirdly Other – “maybe I can find happiness here?”

I used to scoff at the idea of a core self, thinking that we were just an accumulation of external voices and ideas that constructed us (which increased my feelings of hopelessness in trying to change), but when I don’t think through the mind/body separation, so habitually and so religiously defended by the Western Mind, I can see my core self through my body.

It’s in the pain I feel when I get laughed at still; it’s the self that comes to life when there’s brief moments of wondering if I can be in love, and it’s the self that has felt like a dying body within me over my 30s, as I have increasingly watched people live their lives, whilst I have been ever-more destructively trying to chase it from within a cage nobody else can see.

It’s no more a thinking self that a flesh-based feeling self. This is the first time in my life I have been able to see this.

To try to sit with myself, my body; my entire adult life has been an escape from this sensation.

I turned 39 last month, I can’t do another decade like this. Yet, I’ve said this before, in my 20s.

The only problem is that the void, or the space where this ‘core self’ rests, is so horrible to sit with. It’s like a thunderstorm of self-disgust. When the overthinking mind has no actions to overcome this, rather than go back to the same habits, it feels a lot easier than sitting with disgust.

This is why I chose to begin this blog with this Burial sample. It’s by somebody who is transgendered. I couldn’t quite believe how closely I related the the sample on the Burial track,

Although problematic to say, as an outsider who still does not know what to do with his own flesh, I believe ‘trans desire’ is a desire not to only exit and transcend the gender one is born in and thus defined by, but also the type of world in which we all must become, and be a body – a world where there is two types of existential threats ever-closing in, one internal to capitalism, and one external; climate breakdown.

We share desire to escape what we must be.

In this light, it is so brave, to step into the unknown, with only a faint hope of materialising within it.

Suicidal thoughts, as I have experienced them throughout my adult life, have been similar: the desire to take the body beyond the realms of the place in which something seems to prevent it existing.

I wish it was up here, on these walks, that the portal to the world I’ve always wanted to live in can be found. But the other worlds need to be found where I am, if anywhere.

photos from preview of ‘Back to Normalism’

These are photographs from the preview of Back to Normalism, my most recent exhibition, which included a spoken word/sonic performance collaboration with myself and Adam Denton. Thanks to Mark Tighe for taking these pictures, which I feel perfectly capture the shows essence.

Also, I did this quite lengthy interview for Charles Hutchinson press prior to the exhibition, if you want to read it.

Thanks

Photos from the Lockdown year

I recently rediscovered photographs from late 2020 early 2021, a time that already feels foreign, even as still try to adopt to the ‘back to normal’ culture.

I had a studio in my home town at the time, and the area, already a semi-forgotten part of town, felt like the edge of the world during this period.

Some of these photographs are around there, others from the journeys to and from my studio and place of work.

Back to Normalism opening at Micklegate Social

Thank you to everybody who came to see the opening of Back To Normalism @micklegatesocial in York on Friday 13th.
Thanks to @stubbs_mike @wdus.art for making it happen.

The opening was centred around a collaborative performance with @zonal_markings which helped create something really special, which resonated with the ghostly sculptural forms which, like all ghosts, have since disappeared.

But the drawings remain, and only after a day of distance can I see how fitting they for this subterranean space beneath this historic city.

But the exhibition drawings are not only at @micklegatesocial but @fossgatesocial also. And are there to be seen until 13th March.
Time for some rest now…

Pain resurfacing

I’m increasingly having feelings I had as a teenager, when I couldn’t do the things that helped me cope on a daily basis. When my legs were bad, because I’d run too much during that year, or the weather was just way too bad to go out, but I’d also eaten a full meal, and felt that feeling in my belly like a solid weight of judgement. I had to sit there and wait in pain for when it was ok to sleep (I didn’t have alcohol back then).

Why am I writing this now? Because I’m 39 in a week, and I know I can’t live like this anymore – on the run.

It’s got me nowhere. I’ve done some great things, but these artistic feats have by and large been an expression of how I feel about life, and not actually living that life.

But I also know that I’ve spent a long time being incredibly creative in designing routines and projects for myself that, in the short term, abate the horrible feelings about myself and life that are still there, waiting, from being a young person.

I always get scared these days when I write so honesltly. I fear that it will make ten people unfollow me on instagram (I will, in their eyes, become a ‘loser’), it will make people in my workplace think of me with suspicion, that I’m always on the verge of needing time off. But, more so, there’s always that sneering inner voice which isn’t necessarily warning me against exposing how “much of a mess(!!!!!)” I am, but says “I’m sure other people are suffering too, so why do your words need expressing – just get on with it?”

If I’d had been able to “get on with it”, I wouldn’t be writing this now.

My 30s have been a time when my inner battles have evolved from a daily protection from a self disgust in face of the threats I may face, to a self-disgust at my failure to do even the most basic of adult things. Part of this battle has been an inner fight to prove that my pain is real. This has undoubtably been a harsh 15 years for many of us, and I constantly fight the inner suggestion that I ” need to be quiet because there’s people far worse off than me”.

It’s true, I know full well: I live in a town with a hell of a lot of poverty, and a hell of a lot of homelessness since the Tories got in 12 years ago. It hurts me dearly everytime I see it, no more so, because I feel so much shame and guilt at the same time.

Shame and guilt are not mature feelings to have. I would love to feel more empathy and even possibly solidarity with these people. But I can’t do this until I face these horrible feelings about myself that I’ve had since being a young person.

It’s hard, because I have no choice now but to look at the feelings, and look at myself, in a way I didn’t dare do for 25 years. I have to face things that I’ve both run away from, and being ever more desperately trying to run towards (like finding a partner, and all that shit), and realise that at near-enough 40, I’m in a place I always prayed I’d never be in.

I’m here, aged 39, because I couldn’t face the horribleness I felt in the Now for 25 years – in the house, in front of the TV, on the late train home, on a pavement walking home – that sense of disgust and inability to deal with that in that present moment. I’ve got to face that now.

I’ve run faster, faster, faster over the past ten years, because when I stop, the voice I hear tells me that I have failed. I have to listen to that now, kindly.

‘Back To Normalism’

Apologies for posting this so soon after xmas, but this show is also very soon.

This time, however, there’s much more time to see the work: Back to Normalism will be held at both Micklegate Social and Fossgate Social in York from Friday 13th of January to 13th of March 2023.

“Back to Normalism”, a solo exhibition by John Ledger (b. 1984, Barnsley, South Yorkshire), is about a time and culture that has been uprooted and disjointed by a series of crises, plus the reality distorting consequences of trying to repeatedly return to a `before´ moment. The exhibition uses a collection of the artist´s works that span form the present to the last 14 years, back to the 2008 financial crisis, in order to explore what John suggests with a culture that feels increasingly stuck and detached from itself.

Horrorsterity 2.0

Apologies for sharing this now. I know it’s not really in tune with the spirit. But I find that my work tends to dictate the timeframe of its own making, and I’m really super proud of this work.

Horrorsterity 2.0 will go into my upcoming solo exhibition ‘Back to Normalism’ at Micklegate Social and Fossgate social in York, starting on Friday the 13th of January. I understand exhibitions aren’t what’s on everyone’s mind at this time of year, but it’s not far away and I’ll be plugging it very soon!

All the best everyone.

2022 in art and life

First of all I’d to start by concluding that most people have found the last few years some of their hardest with little let up. I think I may have said before, COVID 19 has merely been a catalyst for the spiralling and emergence of so many things that we just cannot easily identify as singular issues. I’ve felt more out of breath. I’m pretty sure it’s not post COVID, but more the anxiety from feeling overwhelmed so frequently.

My year in projects has been largely defined by working on two very long term goals, with a goal of successfully triangulating the challenge of helping set up a grass roots art space in my home town, being able to actually exist as an artist in my home town, whilst also trying to build a good life for myself, a mentally and physically healthy life, with numerous tenets I’ve used to define what this entails.

These are the first years of my adult life where I have noticed some physical health issues, which I think is largely from living so long in a state of anxiety, and the behaviours that spring from that state. So the long term goal also has some urgency for me.

I can’t disclose too much, because these projects hang on threads. Successful Funding bids, random opportunities cropping up (the lifting of the clouds of corruption and endless austerity currently covering this country). The coming year could go one of two very different ways.

I began my making year with the simple enough act of getting back into drawing work in my first and only (so far as I know) period of COVID infection.

The series was labelled ‘Burn out’, but the 3 work here are individually labelled ‘It’s Easier to Imagine being a Billionaire on another planet…’ (itself a twist on the famous saying about capitalism, which I felt summed up our current variations of this situation), ‘ Enmeshed in the World’ and ‘An image for a Sheffield-based poet’, which was designed as a cover for a poet and friend, Jonathan Butcher.

Obviously the carnage in Ukraine is one of the most unexpected horrors to have entered into reality this year. With the threat of nuclear war, that utter insanity, being highest since the end of the Cold War, I conjured my younger artist self, with his more heartfelt naivety to do something that my more weary and wary, more self-conscious older artist self would just find stupid: I made something close to a peace poster. (I still have some of these A3 posters to buy, with profits given to campaigns for the disarmament of nuclear warheads).

This informed the larger and much more invested-in work ‘All Those Promises…’ which was a more experienced response to the gap between promises and how reality turns out, on a governmental level right down to individual actions, disappointments that easily turn us towards cynicism.

This became a final drawing to be included my first solo show since the pandemic. A Radical Redemption was held at Bloc Projects in Sheffield in May. It was an exhibition that was trying to make particles collide in the hope of creating a new situation out of thin air. The only thing was that these particles were abstract.

Although the exhibition did purposely try to generate a sense of claustrophobia as I invited people into a largely introspective space where, of course the world seeped in from all sides, but the interior was a semi-fictionalised account of what is hard to discuss beyond the ‘lived in’ – issues like toxic masculinity, mental health, addiction, and the prospects of radicalisation and madness from the perspective of me; being many things, but also white, straight male.

It was formed within the last two years, where a lot of us fell into our own heads, second guessing our every thoughts. The ideas for the show did produce a lot of concern from friends who were worried that I was putting my name in danger if someone took the information on show literally, but I felt it necessary, as I kind of cleansing of my most paranoid self- suspicions and accusations, and I wanted to do this in public, in an arts space, because I think there’s a lot that has been implicitly put off limits for debate in the arts (and no, I’m not implying there’s a lack of hate speech).

A Radical Redemption did broach a broader question however: do we need to imagine the impossible, bring into being something that didn’t previously exist, in order to get out a cultural and political logic that often seems so hopeless?

Afterwards I spent quite some time developing a performance that I’d agreed to put on for two separate events. This was quite a leap because I’d made a lot of what I’d call ‘situational spoken’ word pieces during the lockdowns as video works. I wasn’t sure how the creation of a scene and words would work in a live space. The work was to some extent about the suffering of ageing, but specifically in, to use a well-used term, times that are ‘out of joint’.

The trauma of the ‘back to normal culture’ that followed the first lockdown and the inability for contemporary society to publicly acknowledge the strains of the flesh, the organic, especially as a millennial, who are still referred to as young, even though we are clearly not.

This lead on to actually decided that we were in a moment of ‘back to normalism’, but whether this began during the COVID crisis, or at some earlier crisis, such as the 2008 financial crash, was harder to define. Nonetheless, it became the focus of the most ambitious drawing project (or at least the physically largest) I’d undertaken in years. This drawing has been designed to, and will hang from hooks once exhibited.

Most recently, as in completed today, is ‘Horrorsterity 2.0’. I don’t think this works needs any explaining.

This isn’t all, I’ve got an exhibition at Micklegate Social and Fossgate Social in the historic Northern capital York, starting on Friday 13th January. It’s really a 2022 exhibition beginning my 2023. I will share more information on this very shortly. All the best.

Don’t scroll at Xmas – it will only make things worse

I’ve a long list of posts, which may or may not exist anymore, from way back into my 20s, documenting how hard I’ve found this time of year.

Truth be told, as I reach my late 30s I I believe I am coming to understand myself better, or at least give myself more forgiveness for the gut assumptions and verdicts I deal myself in those lowest of ebbs. I can approach my 40s with at least the intellectual knowledge of things I can do to try to treat myself better.

I reckon a lot of us found the last two years a hard time in which to work through a lot of our painful emotional knots. I went into 2020 with a clear-ish sense of what I needed to do to make a better life for myself. Then the pandemic happened, and it wasn’t the entire cause, but certainly the catalyst for a qualitative change to the coordinates of reality: ‘back to normal’ looked normal, yet it wasn’t – the structure of feeling had permanently changed.

I found myself battling against a lot of the acidy inner criticisms and defensive bitterness that I thought I’d mastered. I felt like I’d fallen backwards to when I first hit 30, with no plans for my future, surrounded by bright young graduates. It was like I was on a running machine treadmill with the gradient increasingly getting steeper.

Long story short all the worst verdicts on myself happen around Xmas. “You’ve got no life”, “you’ve got no community, no intimacy, no family” are all underpinned by a heightened sense of ageing: I believe the New Year is a much more powerful signifier of ageing than a birthday.

During the last two Xmas breaks I’ve tried to burn the oil, to double down on my ‘projects’, desperate to generate some sense of worth to my presence. Last year I had a meltdown and had to cancel the project that I’d put in all the work for in the first place.

This year I have actually got two important things I need to finish for early to mid January. They are two things that, when I feel better and well, I recognise as valuable projects. But I’m scared I’m going to burn out again.

It’s those feelings in the early hours, or when you’re waiting for a bus, or when you’ve spent a little long walking alongside a noisy road; those horrible verdicts about yourself that intensify. These cause the over-compensating self-worth substitutes to work on fumes. They accelerate the responses that cause burn out.

As I say, I’ve learnt a lot in my mid to late 30s. About the early causations of what would become an inability to embrace, embody and live with my adult self. Shame, like I was ‘wrong’, (the way I smiled, moved, but especially the intense way I spoke and behaved) which helped build an army of inner critics in my head that wouldn’t let me accept my being. And that I’ve spent my adult life trying to go the hard way round because I could never see my shape in any identifiabily worthy adult shape.

When these feelings dig down my identity as an artist is no longer something I should treasure, but beconed something I put a curse on, trying to gain a sense of human-ness through finally getting to the top of that ‘artist’ hill, where I’m crowned as a valid exercise in human-ing. But, I burn out, and I’ve pushed the boulder up that hill so many times, only for it to roll down again.

This could be the start of a life that works a little better. But I’ve got a couple of weeks where I’ve got to face the brunt of self verdicts and emotions I really don’t like the taste of.

At 5am this morning I asked myself the rhetorical question: when was there a time when you scrolled social media and felt better for it afterwards?

I’m pretty sure it’s rhetorical as the answer is “never”. I think, if I manage to say that to myself enough over the next couple of weeks I may just about make it to mid January in a decent state.