Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I’ll talk about showing your work, sharing yourself, why it’s so hard to do it, and why I think you ought to anyway.
Get more advice on IG: @bethpickensconsulting
Join the Mind Your Practice Homework Club: www.mindyourpractice.com
Homework Club is for every creative person who wants deadlines and accountability! I mean, who doesn’t want that? Each month you’ll get: homework handouts, bonus audio content, access to a private members-only IG account, and a webinar led by author and arts consultant Beth Pickens. Just $12/month through 2020.
THIS EPISODE'S HOMEWORK:
Ok, let’s talk about your homework. First, think about yourself in terms of showing yourself and sharing your work. Is this something you avoid? Do you want to do it differently, on new terms? Is there work you want to show more of? Is there anything you want to share less of?
Next, consider some recent work, any discipline, in which you connected to vulnerability and the willingness of the artist to share themselves. I just read the new novel Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak, which I loved, and vulnerability came up for me again and again in this story of death and disconnection. How does another artist’s vulnerability connect inside of you?
Then, imagine yourself as a conduit for connection through your work. What in your practice makes you feel vulnerable? Which projects? Sharing it where and how? Why do you decide to share or not share? Have this conversation and answer these questions with another artist that you trust.
Let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you.
Mind Your Practice is produced by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. You can find out more about her practice at carolynpennypackerriggs.com
Ep. 7: Showing + Sharing Yourself
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I’ll talk about showing your work, sharing yourself, why it’s so hard to do it, and why I think you ought to anyway.
*****
Hello artists. Back in 2014, I saw Untitled Feminist Show, a theater production by director/playwright Young Jean Lee that featured six performers, all nude throughout the almost word-less show. Like most audiences who saw it, I was bowled over by the work and I stayed after for the artist talk-back. One of the performers, Katy Pyle, was answering an audience member’s question about the show. Katy discussed the show’s international tour and what it was like to perform the work and mentioned that sometimes they didn’t feel like being naked for the performance. This remark, offered casually within a larger answer, really stuck with me. I thought of how generous it was of the performers to be in the work, whether they felt like being naked or not, night after night.
Though the work felt powerful and the performers seemed to me to be artistic giants that night, I also noticed just how vulnerable they were, nude and performing for the gaze of thousands of people every week. Each performer was willing to show and share themselves so completely for Young Jean Lee’s production.
I thought of Katy Pyle’s comment years later in 2016 when I was at The Broad museum in Los Angeles to see artist Xandra Ibarra's Nude Laughing, a performance that had us, the audience, follow her around a floor of the museum as she, also nude, pulled on a nylon skin cocoon and stuffed it full of objects of white womanhood. The artist’s nakedness contributed to the piece’s undeniable power and I wondered how often Xandra Ibarra also didn’t feel like doing it that night.
*****
Your work doesn’t have to require you to be nude on stage in front of 500 people in order for you to feel exposed in your art. It is hard to be vulnerable, to show the still-forming or delicate or sensitive spaces inside of us to anyone else. And this is what is asked of artists when they share their work, whether in-progress, through a studio visit, on social media, previews for artist friends, or presenting it to the public. Sharing your practice, sharing your art is an act of showing yourself and that can feel like a tall order sometimes. We don’t always feel like mining our insides and then showing them to the outside.
*****
And to be sure, you don’t have to. You can keep your practice or parts of it to yourself as long as you want, forever if you like. You can also decide to whom you show yourself and in what contexts. Maybe you want to develop a work and understand it yourself before you bring anyone else in. Or you prefer to keep your process more private, away from the dubious input of strangers on the internet. Or maybe you share it in stages, showing your work first to your most trusted supporters and working outward from there.
The point is that you have choices regarding how you share your work, to whom, when, and in which contexts.
*****
So why push yourself to be vulnerable in this way? Why share yourself? Why expose your work, when it’s an intimate part of you? There are a ton of reasons, of course. When you share your work with others, you create authentic connection to other people. You communicate and let yourself be known, taking up your place in the world. You plant seeds for the work so that it can have opportunities to be in the world. You show people what’s possible, how you understand and ask questions, the ways in which you try to make sense of things. Showing and sharing yourself, in part, encourages others to do the same.
*****
I, for one, wouldn’t be who I am without the vulnerability of artists who share their work, show themselves, and let themselves be known to others. The cumulative work by thousands and thousands and thousands of artists that I’ve experienced over my lifetime has taught me how to be a person in the world, something that can be very difficult to be sometimes.
I wonder what kinds of vulnerability in artwork has touched you lately.
*****
Ok, let’s talk about your homework. First, think about yourself in terms of showing yourself and sharing your work. Is this something you avoid? Do you want to do it differently, on new terms? Is there work you want to show more of? Is there anything you want to share less of?
Next, consider some recent work, any discipline, in which you connected to vulnerability and the willingness of the artist to share themselves. I just read the new novel Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak, which I loved, and vulnerability came up for me again and again in this story of death and disconnection. How does another artist’s vulnerability connect inside of you?
Then, imagine yourself as a conduit for connection through your work. What in your practice makes you feel vulnerable? Which projects? Sharing it where and how? Why do you decide to share or not share? Have this conversation and answer these questions with another artist that you trust.
Let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you.
*****
Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. If you are an artist who likes to be told what to do, I am more than happy to boss you around through email and social media. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting and join my mailing list on my website bethpickens.com. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.