MELODY VAUGHAN
*please be aware that many of the older posts have formatting issues due to the migration from my old Squarespace website to here. I am slowly updating things but it could take me some time.
Last week I recommended the excellent book – What they didn’t teach you in art school: what you need to know to survive as an artist. By Rosalind Davis and Annabel Tilley – a book full of excellent, practical advice on how to survive in your chosen career.
This week, I thought I’d recommend a book that will
After last week’s post contemplating the idea of la rentrée créative (a creative return to normal after the summer break) I thought I’d continue with the theme of reflection and review ready for the end of the year ahead.
I have a few book recommendations which I’ve been meaning to share and they offer opportunities for thinking holistically about your
There has been an undeniable shift in mood during the last week. Some days it seems I can perceive the light changing and the weather shift. Although not cold, the mornings are chillier and I can no longer pretend that the evenings are balmy and long. A new season is here. Every year I try to remind myself not to
A day of hot sunshine. In this recessed garage entrance, shielded from the sun, the air is thick and static. Residues of hot car tyres and tarmac, exhaust fumes and paint. The building itself is a calamine lotion pink, painted all over, even in these places that people don’t really go or see very often. I captured an intersection of
A barrier of corrugated iron separates the blue harbour water from a standing pond-like volume. Its surface is slick and still, there is a layer of something floating on the surface which diffracts the light like the halo around the moon, rainbowy and pale. Behind the iron zipper teeth is a line of wooden posts, topped with slabs of white,
Am I a photographer? she asks. Quite a reasonable question to ask someone who is attending a photography even run by photographers for photographers. I don’t hesitate in saying ‘no, I’m a maker and a writer’. After all, that is what I am officially trained in, I have a degree in making stuff and an-almost-lifetime in writing stuff down. And
Yesterday I made two things. One may stretch the definition of ‘to make’ and the other possibly falls under ‘re-purposing’ more than making. As I made them I wondered about this, whether the verb to make has enough elasticity to hold all the things we makers do as part of our practice. Even if, maybe especially if, we do not
Public speaking can be scary. Much as it might be tempting to turn to the gin to help with the nerves, I have some tips which will help you harness those feelings and allow you to find your natural voice. [Just to be clear, in this context I am calling all situations where you might need to talk about your
When you are communicating about your work through writing, the goal is to find the voice that best expresses your ideas, a voice that sounds authentic. Usually this is your own voice – the voice that sounds like you. It’s so much easier to write in the way that you would naturally talk and it almost always sounds better to
The Makers & Tools project came about out of conversations with makers. Just before Christmas, I was asked by a magazine to interview contemporary craft makers about their relationships to their tools. I selected six emerging makers, working in different materials and with different approaches, whose work intrigued me. In one interview, the maker told me how at the start
I feel like this next sentence could get me into trouble: the reality of writing about your creative practice is that it will never end – you will probably need more than one artist’s statement and you should update all your text regularly.
I spend a lot of time helping makers feel confident about their writing skills, and I’m aware
A while ago, on a Saturday morning, I visited the Oxfam bookshop and walked out with three books: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, Manage your day-to-day by 99U and Quiet by Susan Cain. I read them all by the end of the weekend.
As is often the way with such trips, you cannot
With degree shows in full swing, and New Designers opening today, I feel in a reflective mood. I graduated from my BA (Decorative Arts at Nottingham Trent) three years ago and, as is the way with such things, the time feels like it has disappeared incredibly quickly and yet it also feels like an age since we were setting up
In the last post on social media promotion, we looked at creating a range of content for your various social media platforms. I thought it might make sense, now, to take a quick look at hashtags and how you can harness the possibilities they offer.
So, you’ve got a show coming up, or maybe you’re just about to reveal a new collection. Perhaps you’ve updated your website or have an online shop to launch. Quite rightly, social media is going to be high on your list of ways to promote this event, but how to keep it from sounding rather same-y after a while, and
I am going to let you in on a secret here, one that is going to sound odd coming from someone who spends a lot of her time asking people to write more. The thing is, to write about your work you don’t even have to write at all.
I picked up the book and knew immediately that a friend would like it. That an exploration of the possibilities from one tree would appeal to her. I knew that it would hold descriptions of the connection between material and process, material and object, material and craftsperson, that would make sense to her maker’s sensibility. I was excited to
This seems to be a perennial problem for makers. Faced with having to write an artist’s statement, it can be hard to know what to do – use the 1st person ‘I’ or the 3rd person ‘she or he’. Lots of us have been given the advice that the 3rd person sounds more professional and that the 1st person sounds
I first read this book a few years ago while I was in second year of my BA. At the time I was still uncertain of the path ahead and this book, which focuses on how to set up useful strategies for maintaining your creative drive, helped me to see that creativity is not an elusive bolt of lightning,
I like to think of words as another material at your disposal. That the writing you create, about the things you make, is just as much your ‘work’ as the physical objects. If we think of writing like this, then it makes sense that your writing should look and sound like the things you make- it should reflect your work.
This book, written over a thousand years ago, by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius is a wonderful touchstone for when things get a bit too much. It is a proto self-help book, but unlike modern self-help which is written for an audience, and aims to be instructive, this text was written by Marcus Aurelius privately, for no-one else’s eyes.
Ok, so you may have noticed that the book choices are becoming less about making specifically. But bear with me. This book deals with creativity and the impulse we all possess to be curious, to create. It tries to unpick the narrative that we have all inherited that creativity is mysterious and that the artistic way of life should
So far, we have looked at how you can build writing into your creative practice by establishing a regular writing routine. We’ve looked at the different ways you can do this, as well as thinking about what you can begin to write about. We’ve also looked at different approaches to writing, how these might ally themselves with the way you
This book critically investigates the making of art and examines the narratives of production in art, because “making is a form of thinking”. The authors believe that the method of making the art work and its conceptual meaning are tightly bound. Which makes this book an important read for any craft maker.
So, last week I asked “what kind of writer are you?” Are you a ‘gardener’ type who likes to plant a seed and watch it grow? Or are you an ‘architect’ type who likes to have a structure or plan to work to? We discovered that often the way you make can help you to discover what kind
It’s possible that I’m a little biased about this book; I was Kyra’s studio assistant for a year and a half when I was a student. And in that time I saw how integral drawing was to her making practice, how her ceramic work is itself a form of drawing. In this book she asks makers from all disciplines
A long time ago I trained as an archaeologist. It’s where my love of objects, of the narratives we weave about our lives, and of searching out unseen things comes from. If you’ve ever nosied around on London’s Thames foreshore, you’ll have had a glimpse of these things for yourself. I’ve written about it before (and no
You will never find me without a book (or three) on the go. I am not sure I know who I am without books; they have been a constant in my life since I can remember, and reading brings me joy day after day, especially when the world feels tough. I love stories, but never seem to read enough fiction.
This is probably not a question you ask yourself very often, but spending a bit of time pondering how you feel most comfortable writing will help you find when it comes to getting started. You might have no idea what sort of writer you are; the concept of being ‘comfortable’ when writing might seem really different from your experience of
Last week we looked at ways of setting up a writing routine, on your terms, so that you feel excited and inspired to write about your practice regularly. Now it’s time to figure out what you’ll actually write.
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