THE BLANK PAGE

Every artist knows creation anxiety. The anxiety of the white page. The fear of revealing to yourself and others that you’re not as brilliant or talented as you thought you were. The pressure that you could put anything on that page, but that’s the beauty of it as well. It’s pure possibility. 

Vellum, both skin and paper. Skin made sense to me because the fear we sometimes bring to the symbol of the white page is as if we were plastering our sketches and ideas onto our own skin; branding us as either worthy or a fraud. 

Paired with the narratives in my work of body, jewellery and transformation, as well as the surprisingly beautiful sheen of the vellum, I wanted to transform it into a pearl. 

I couldn’t ignore the significance of skin as surface, as superficiality, and then the origins of a pearl, a covering; layers over an irritant. In my case, the seed of an idea ‘coated’ by materialising it. Art in itself about making the abstract into something we can experience externally.

In making it a pearl necklace, the idea of value naturally revealed itself. The anxiety comes from the idea that our creativity and the ‘suffering artist’ are commodified, it is our value and worth: our power to turn an ‘irritant’, a trauma, an idea, into something beautiful.