clearing out the studio

OK, so regular readers will probably be up on the gossip that i'm moving back to melbourne and heading to the UK for a 6-month jaunt, both within in the next couple of months. With such a big move comes the inevitable clean up. And the inevitable throw out. And the inevitable nostalgia and the inevitable hayfever.

What i didn't really prepare for was how hard it is to clean out your studio! I mean before this house (where my studio is in my garage), i've never really had a studio that wasn't at uni. Rooms full of stuff and a whole bunch of stuff on my computer, yes. But no actually separate room, with workspace and power tools and a dodgy CD player, etc.

And cleaning it up has been tough. I've had to be as ruthless with the stuff in there as i have been in the rest of the house and it's like pulling fucking teeth. One of my rights as an artist is to keep shit that is good for nothing else, but the potential to be part of an artwork, one day. Yeah, right.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, i think i've grown up in the last couple of year and my practice has started to refine. Refine? Maybe more like 'become less random' and that means that i don't really have the excuse of collecting random shit. I know what i need with my artworks now and it's actually a pretty limited amount of things. And these days, it's usually the stuff that i've already used up anyway.

So there's been a bit of a killing spree in the studio. Thankfully i'm having a garage sale and will be able to offload lots of old paper and materials, stretchers, etc to friends (jade? are you prepared?) so it's not quite as traumatic as it could be. but it still hurts.

Another hard lesson I've learnt has been about actually having a studio. Living in Wollongong, my house has a garage, so i put my studio there. Plus, there aren't that many artists' studios kicking around down here. But, being in a garage, it's also really fucking dusty so i've learned a valuable lesson about having a garage studio - don't have one. In my next life (ie, when i get back to melbourne), i'm going to graduate to the land of the real artist and actually have a studio that doesn't accumulate a layer of crap within 24 hours (aided by the proximity to the steelworks). And i'm going to have one with a bunch of other artists too. Being within spitting distance of the house has been great, i can go out there from 10pm until 2am, or at 6am in the morning and it hasn't been too much of a chore, but i've kind of lost out on that sense of inclusion that comes with sharing a studio.

So, farewell trusty garage studio of wollongong, here's to greener pastures.