Welcome to The Slow Burner

A space for reflections on creativity and meaning making.

This year I’ve had lots of questions about my creative practice. Some of these threads have been unspooling for years, loosening and re-tangling themselves in different ways around every creative project I’ve been working on:

Am I an illustrator or an artist?

Do I promise too much?

Why can’t I let other people in?

What is this push-pull of control versus chaos in my life?

I wanted to have a space to open up some of these questions, and social media feels like too much of a confined space to do that. I’m hoping that by writing about them, and discussing them with others, I can share some reflections that might open up some roads to wander down. I’ll also be using this space to talk about my creative approaches, looking at areas like narrative/storytelling, interactive interventions, illustrating emotions, using ink as a medium to loosen up image-making, and what I’ve learned from teaching med students how to be artists.

This might be a monthly offering, I’m hoping to audio record each newsletter so that you can listen if you don’t feel like reading.

The title of my Substack comes from a time when I was working at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as a Crew member (gallery assistant): it was the first time that the Turner Prize had been hosted somewhere outside of London, and so the atmosphere on the cavernous floors of the towering old flour mill was vibrant and full of anticipation. As Crew, we were the guardians of four carefully-constructed rooms housing the contenders for the prize. Being a gallery assistant is a precious, unusual job: you get to spend 8 hours a day up close with artworks that - over a period of many months - you get to know on an extremely intimate level, as their protector and appraiser. Your purpose is to get acquainted with the finer details of the artworks, learn their history, uncover their secrets, and share these (in whispered conversation) with visitors. The Turner Prize that year (2011) attracted more visitors than BALTIC had ever seen, as people jostled and flooded through the labyrinthine exhibition chambers to witness the spectacle on their home turf. I lurked, fondly in Martin Boyce’s domicile, decoding his cryptic runic alphabets, gently brushing up against paper leaves, learning that the works in his room were all connected with subtle coordinates, like they had their own unconscious language that shaped their form. When Martin won the prize that year, someone at BALTIC printed out and pasted up the Guardian review of his work on the wall of the staff computer room: Triumph of a Slowburner. This phrase struck me immediately and has stayed with me, emitting a soft glow, ever since. It must somehow speak to the tension I’m often caught inside, between super-efficiency (that leads to burn-out, physical discomfort and resentment), and a slower, softer, inquisitive way of being in the world and absorbing its mystery - something I want to consciously orientate myself towards. Writing this newsletter perhaps will offer me a way of abiding there.