March already and the dark days are slowly melding into days of longer light – always a hard transition for me as a lover of darkness. I get so much more done in these focused dark winter months! And it’s been busy these past months.

I’m working with “my archive”, unboxing it, and video recording the contents – what, when, where and why – as I remember it. Then packing it all up again. Speaking to it gives some context as to its contents which I hope will be helpful to whoever has the eventual job of cataloguing it.

It is vast and a labour of love,an emotional encounter that brings the past into the present. It is also a responsibility that I need, and want, to honour. 

The archive was never planned nor intentional. Only recently did I have the opportunity to gather all my ‘stuff’ remaining from 50 years of practice under one roof and I was shocked at the amount and volume.

I am a keeper of stuff of that there is no doubt, and a keeper for various reasons

• in order to remember (such was the pace of working life that recalling what had gone before could only be done through physical and material evidence)
• nor was there time to sift, sort and discard (things were put into boxes and stored in a varieyt of spaces and places with whoever had room)
• because people matter and the people with whom I was working mattered to me (this is also their story)
• to evidence work for tax-purposes (the years that had to be kept spanned into decades, and they have a story to tell too)
• because it all started in analogue days and that flyer was all you had of your last job to help you get your next job
• writing as a way to think (hence the 100’s of notebooks)
• because I was once, briefly, a registered company (and there is a lot of paraphanalia goes with that)
• live practice has set and costume (some has been gifted to other artists or organisations but I still have lots of it, not wanting to waste anything)
• I recall the details of things best through analogue materiality (rather than through digital documentation)
• Materiality matters (the sensory substance of things)

It is not really an archive to me and I struggle referring to it that way – it feels grandiose somehow! What it is though is a record, a history, traces of a live practice, what goes into the making of work, and a witness to the many many people who were present as collaborators and contributors.

There are flyers, funding applications, gifts, thank-you cards, photographs, newspapers, reviews, props, costume, bits of set, notebooks, video tapes, handwritten audience feedback, workshop materials, talks, workshop notes, interviews, lots of marginalia and ephemera, and people, so many people who were all part of the work. 

Accumulatively, and chronologically I know it has a story to tell. It speaks to a history of Community Arts, and to a history of disability-led arts. It speaks to an independent artists process and to a social values-driven practice. It speaks to a dyspraxic’s practice (another of the reasons I kept so much is I need matter and material to make sense of time). It speaks to the evolution of arts culture in Scotland, to the social politics of the time and to the shifts, changes and evolution over time.

I’m only on Box 5, less than a quarter of the way through. There’s a lot of unboxing to go

These are troubled times, heavy times, hard times in the world right now. This is the context we are working in. What can I do as an art maker that can possibly make any difference? Art-making is both a doing and a being, actions and behaviours. What is most needed now? Most useful?

One thing I’ve learned from the archive is that my work has never remained static, never become stuck or fixed. It has always moved and changed in response to the times and the context in which it sits. And looking back, at the past, helps inform a better future.

Go well as we leave behind the cosy dark days

Janice