How I'm Flowing

detail of Tangled Web,
current work in progress, December 21, 2022

I have returned to writing on this blog. A couple of years ago I signed off intending to move on to developing a profile on Instagram and other social media platforms and to essentially archive the writings that began here in 2008.

I had the option of closing it down entirely and deleting everything and are now very glad I didn't choose that. I've come to understand that this is the only platform where can't be censored or cancelled by the new authoritarians:

this is the only place where I have total control and can freely express myself without the potential of being banished, silenced and cancelled. 

This blog has never had much of a public profile and a with just over 200 followers, considering it has been established 15 years, it hasn't been particularly "successful" in some estimations. But having a large following or being "influential" has never had relevance or been much to do with why feel I compelled to write ideas down. The reflections here comprise part of my archive of developing as a visual artist. It is the diary of how I've interacted and responded to personal circumstances and political ideas.

I am glad to return to recording ideas here and in some ways feel compelled to do so because dialectical discourse is being severely curtailed in many of the places where it is supposed to flourish, like within the SDA. In the international internet sewing community. I think apart from entertaining myself and writing as an act to clarify my thoughts, I might even have some interesting views to share. It can be done here without the reactionary Social Justice warriors shutting me down.

in my garden, "FLOW" carved into a sandstone block

Starting today, I'm going to write a little series reflecting on how I think the digital age is adversely affecting creative minds and how I believe there is an inherent incompatibility to successfully integrate technology into artistic ontology...or at least, how attempts to graft the frankensteinian organs are disrupting and significantly harming how creative minds work 

(hint...look this up: Flow)

There is absolutely an incompatibility in being an advocate of Critical Social Justice and being a free thinking critical practitioner of visual art. Any ideology that starts placing limits on what can be said and made is a dangerous, creativity stunting dogma.

                                                 passionfruit flowers growing on deck

FLOW, part one

I'm immensely curious how social media is affecting humans in modernity. I think as a 63 years old woman artist there are some insights, opinions and experiences I have which are unique and going to be valuable in the future. 

I've lived in the crossover eras of three enormously significant social changes putting me in a small group with contemporaries that have knowledge and experience of what our little bit of the world was like before, during and after those changes. By 2040 women like us will be gone so I feel its important to make a record of how I've experienced these changes.

 The social changes I refer to are:

 #1/ the rise and success of 2nd wave feminism, meaning I grew up not expecting to live my life in marriage/family/domesticity but that I would have a job and monetary income that was my own, 

#2/ women were not taken seriously as artists, even more so in non traditional media that wasn't paint, and it was exceedingly rare to be recognised or be a professional woman artist. 

#3/ the world before screens.(what to call this world? I intend to refer to it as "Pre-Tube", meaning before the invention and desemination of the cathode ray screen (television)). By the middle of this century there won't be a human being who hasn't stared at a glass screen that has text and coloured pictures on it. Just as the printing press was a momentous technology that changed how humans lived and stored knowledge the advent of the computer age will impact the direction human of civilisation into the forseeable future. What a strange creature I must seem to young people that I was 10 when I saw my first televison. My parents owned one in July 1969 because my Mum got my sister and I out of bed around 11pm to watch men walking on the surface of the Moon.

From 1969 until the late 1990s looking at screens with text and pictures didn't take up much time in my life. It was still only television, the box on legs that cost a lot of money and sat in the lounge room with all the chairs faced toward it. Then the dream of an American boy called Bill Gates that everybody should have a PC started getting actualised everywhere. I bought my teen son an Atari and a Commodore 64 because he would be left behind in the future if he didn't know how to use the technology.