Musings on my practice – MELODY VAUGHAN

Creative abandonment – how to reconcile the past?

November 12, 2025

Looking back through the images to find the beginning. I think it all started on the big train trip to Amsterdam/Berlin/Cologne in the summer between 2nd year and 3rd year (2013). When I started to take photographs that were less about recording distinct things and more about noticing arrangements and the intersection of textures, angles and light. For the next year these pictures felt like swatches or sketches – reference points for other work, snippets of things I wished to remember or use in something else.

But there were always a few images that stood out for me, that were complete and perfect in and of themselves. These were the ones that I felt worked as compositions, as works of art that I created. But I never showed them like that. They stayed in my camera, on my computer, printed out in my research but never on their own.

A regular practice – just not the one I’d expected

November 30, 2020

I used to get wound up about this, feeling like it was some kind of moral failure to have my enthusiasm taper off, that it was just a matter of working harder, pushing through and all that other bullshit we’ve internalised from the world of ‘proper work’. But now, instead of blaming myself, I’d rather ask questions that help understand why this happens, why this pattern belongs to me. I might start by asking “how is it that I have so much energy to begin with?” and then “is there something that happens that changes things for me? Can I understand where the energy goes or why?” Perhaps there are general circumstances or thought patterns that get me here each time, perhaps in this month it was specific things (migraines I’m looking at you). Either way, I’m interested in what was going on, how I was feeling and how that

The gap between the feeling and the doing

April 1, 2020

I started the year with the intention of slowing down and taking my time deciding what to do with my creative practice (currently my curatorial practice). I had made arrangements and come to terms with the fact that I was going to be doing less in my creative consultancy business – fewer client sessions, teaching and events – for a few months. That this was necessary to be able to think, explore and understand what I wanted to create and contribute to the world. So, why would this plan change, now?

Why does this sudden enforcement of slowing down, distancing and solitude (which felt so necessary in January) actually make me feel like I should be doing more, being busy, creating stuff and getting it out there, right now?! I feel like I’m part of a race I didn’t sign up to.

A poetic response to objects

February 14, 2018

Something I’m particularly drawn to, is the possibility for objects to be inspiration for other art work, not just responding to their aesthetic or formal qualities, but the emotional response. I’d love to see more poetry written about pots, paintings inspired by blown glass, photography exploring jewellery. Mostly I’d love to see more people who work with or create objects talk about them in a sensory and emotive way. I’d like to hear beyond the usual materials and techniques, beyond processes and finishes. Beyond, even, the conceptual underpinnings of the work. I’d love to hear how looking at an object makes people feel. How handling it or using it alters them slightly. I’d love to hear about the myriad thoughts that spin off from that object like dominoes out into space. These personal experiences of objects are things no archaeologist can uncover, they are often unvoiced, even now. Ever curious,

What is my creative practice?

January 10, 2018

I am not sure that the work I do with makers and other creatives, in supporting their creative practices, counts as my own ‘creative practice’. There are many things I do which stretch me creatively, and there are certainly things which I consider I have created, which would not exist otherwise. But is it the same as a creative practice where I make things – objects or ideas? Over the past couple of years I have struggled to reclaim my making practice (I’ve blogged about that here and here), and there’s still a long way to go on that front. But I also have a writing practice and that sometimes feels overlooked, undervalued.

Thinking through making: wondering about tools

October 18, 2017

Not so long ago I made a couple of objects one after another. Of the two things, one gave me more satisfaction during the making, and the other brings me more joy as a finished object. The piece of twisted metal, that I spied on the pavement and pocketed, was quickly filed and made into a wearable object. The other thing – a tool – was a serendipitous moment where I realised that a brass ‘ring’ (a strip of brass folded into a geometric shape) that I made in first year of my BA and which, every time I wore it caught on my clothes and was too sharp on my skin, would finally have a home, wedged into the crack in an old wooden handle.

Notes on my creative practice: overcoming an inflexible mindset

October 4, 2017

I suspect I have an inflexible mindset. It troubles me, especially since I have learnt, via TED, that flexible and adaptive mindsets are the key to success for our youth and for people in general. How worrisome that my brain interprets things the same way and really doesn’t like to budge when it thinks it knows best. A growth mindset, is what it is called when your brain allows possibilities to happen. Why is it that my growth mindset is fair-weather, and only chooses to appear in certain situations? Why does it not grab hold of me, each and every day, when I am groggy in the morning or unable to muster the energy for simple tasks, and shout at me ‘see this differently’, ‘leave the house’ and ‘do something you don’t much fancy, trust me on this, you’ll feel so much better’. I sometimes wonder if leaving the governance

Notes on my creative practice: my photographic shorthand

August 30, 2017

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 wall and cupboard, painted chevron floor slanting off into the distance. Bright turquoise, vivid against the chalky pink, the traffic yellow floor paint seems dull and yet jarring next to them. Fire-engine red obligatory safety panels hover in the corner – they draw the eye down the line of the planes’ interaction.

Notes on my creative practice: seeing & recording

August 23, 2017

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, they look like extra strong mints that have been squared. More iron, but a paler brown, conduits for lines of wires – palest blues and a wobbly line of aqua green. The bank of the river holds back two metal wire fence panels, which have fallen towards the water, but don’t quite touch. Their regular grills silhouetted on the beigey muck below. The whole scene is one of contrast of colour, texture and materials.

Notes on my creative practice: photography as drawing

August 16, 2017

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 yet, photography is the medium I find myself turning to more often than not. Through the camera is how I have started to see the world. It is how I remember the places I have been, it is how I catalogue the experiences and the objects. It is my cypher for actual memories, or for drawing, or some other method of remembering that people use. I find the image I took becomes the shorthand, the shortcut in my mind of where I was, when. The image becomes everything.

Notes on my creative practice: when is making not making?

August 8, 2017

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 create things out of raw materials. You know where you stand with a maker who takes the raw material and creates something that didn’t exist before. It is magic, it is astonishing. It takes vision and skill combined. It takes patience and commitment. But what of the people who take something as it already is and adds to it, incorporates it into something bigger, adapts it or alters it? What then? It seems to me that there are still all the elements as before – the vision, the skill, the