TRANSCRIPT

The_Word_Transcript

Welcome to The Word and Housekeeping: Shona Peterson, The Word

Introduction to artED, The Thing and the ‘Joined up thinking’ talk programme: Grainne Sweeney

Mindfulness body exercise: Helen Shaddock

Reading from The Thing ‘In no particular order’: Barbara Trevitt

Conversation between Rachel Boyd and Helen Shaddock

RACHEL

I’m just going to have a bit of a conversation with Helen between each reading. And I’m going to start this conversation really by trying to think through how this body of life writing that you present us with, and think how that relates to your practice as an artist. And you’ve touched really beautifully on this in recent weeks when you were invited by Anna Foster on BBC Radio north to talk a bit about your practice, and in particular, you  had defined yourself as a multidisciplinary artist. Reading through The Thing, much of it seems to be an attempt to empathize and reconcile with your multiple diagnoses, as well as how you personally relate, define and navigate through these lived experiences in your own words. Now, as Grainne has mentioned, you’ve previously done this through your diary keeping practice, something that you began during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and I was just wondering, how does your writing fit in relationship to your wider practice as an artist? Is it fair to say that perhaps the thing is a continuation of this diary keeping practice?

HELEN 

Yeah, I think that’s really fair. I don’t actually distinguish between the different elements of my practice. I wouldn’t say that writing is separate. I would say that it it’s all kind of one conglomerate.

When I look back now, when the diaries began they were so sparse. The activities were very much just kind of a list of what the activities were. And over time, they developed an audience. And I so I every day post them on social media. And during the pandemic, it was intended as a way to keep social connections with people and use it as a kind of tool. And somehow they gathered, kind of an expansive audience, particularly within my local community as well, and it became clear that people were affected by them, let’s say, which gave me a bit more confidence. And so as my confidence grew, I began to maybe reveal a bit more about the difficulties that I was having, or the behaviors that I employ, such like and with that it was almost like my sharing, actually made more connections with people, so my honesty was encouraged. And then it became that I wanted to write more, but the tiny, little, A5 sheet that I use, [didn’t have space for the other things that I wanted to include] like the film recommendations or the podcast I’ve been listening to, which actually generated a lot of interest, in terms of, you know, people would then recommend me things and it that generated kind of another level of engagement. I didn’t want to stop doing that, but I also wanted to carry on expanding the writing bit. So then that’s when I started working on The Thing. Vivienne here tonight is was part of a writing group that we established during the pandemic and I’ll be really intrigued to know, actually, how much of the thing she notices, little elements of because I certainly started writing some of these things during the pandemic, and some of them have morphed, you know, and some of them have changed. There’s a whole mixture of new stuff and old stuff. But, yeah, I think as well, when I think of my practice, I often hear the words as I write. So again, that becomes like a sonic practice, and I’ve often used sound within my work, and that’s one of the reasons why it is really wonderful that I’ve got people reading my work tonight, because I see this as a little experiment for me, or a way of understanding my work better, because obviously I’ve listened to my words in my own head. I have voices in my head, the anorexic voices, the OCT voices, etc, all the time. And they are very, very rhythmic. So it’s fascinating, actually. Now as this is an opportunity to hear like three other interpretations of how they are read or interpreted. And you know, I control that to a certain element in how they’re written on the page, which we might come to in another part of the conversation. But, yeah, I’m really interested to hear what three readers bring to those words.

Reading from The Thing, ‘Speedy Gonzales’: Grainne Sweeney

Conversation between Rachel Boyd and Helen Shaddock

RACHEL 

I sort of wanted to talk about color within your work, and how I understand your practices, primarily as a visual artist, and much of your work as a visual artist occupies quite distinct color gradients on the color spectrum quite often in sort of two tone like cover of The Thing, often through repeated pattern and form. And you’ve touched quite a lot in the diaries, and they feel to me quite orderly in their preoccupation with documenting and recording time. So as someone whose work so often engages with sequencing and arrangement, I wondered whether you’d be able to say something about how you came to bring the work together, so how you were composing publication.

HELEN 

Yeah, and it is, it is like I compose it both as a sonic thing and how I imagined the pacing. So again, like making sure that the like in a piece of music, there’s cruchendos, and then there’s, you know, really focused bits, and then there’s other bits that are, like, softer and calmer, slower, pace, longer. So I when I was piecing the writing together, as I said, some of it was older pieces I wrote, some of them more recent. I was conscious of first kind of wanting to set a scene, so the first one that I chose, in my mind that gives some kind of context to allow the leader some introduction, to then be able to, hopefully with the more abstract pieces, have a bit of a better understanding of where those are coming from. And then I want the reader to be able to after some of them have a break, you know, some of them are really quite heavy. Some of them are lighter in tone. So it was about kind of getting a pattern within them where it’s a journey that is like up and down, yeah, one both in pace and length and tone, I guess. And I suppose color lightens that, like, colorful publication, yeah, so I, I kind of use color as a way of, like, luring the audience in. So, some of the topics of conversation are a bit, yeah, they’re hard hitting, they’re honest, they’re not particularly easy topics to discuss, and therefore I kind of wonder whether it needs to be cheered up a bit and and so a lot of my my work dealing with these kind of difficult subjects from an outside perspective, can on the on the face of it, can look really like whimsical or childish or like bright colors, but maybe it’s a way of me kind of luring an audience in attracting them. To kind of be drawn to on a surface level, and then hopefully, once that’s been established, with a little more time, there’s layers being peeled, and that’s when the more kind of nuanced or deeper understanding comes with the more kind of problematic or difficult or challenging topics within the work. So yeah, I think as well for me, my life is challenging, and as much as for an audience, I also want joy in my life. So it makes sense I get joy from color, so I want to play with color as much as I can. And if that is a way of kind of adding a bit more joy to my life, then so be it. Is that selfish?

RACHEL 

No, I think, I think it’s a beautiful motivating factor for your practice.

HELEN 

Yeah? Bringing joy to people. I would hope so. I really would.

Reading from The Thing, ‘Frantic Thoughts’: Dennis Jobling

Conversation between Rachel Boyd and Helen Shaddock

RACHEL 

So we’ve talked about how the collection is formatted very particular, particularly in terms of color, but it’s also formatted quite particularly in terms of both the written and the spoken word. I mean, I think frantic thoughts is actually quite a good example of that, often to match maybe the tempo and the pacing of both your kind of thought patterns and your actual physical movements, and the language that you kind of use to do that throughout the collection feels really simple and quite immediate. And could you say a bit more about that?

HELEN

I think maybe I just speak in simple terms.  In a manner that, yeah, I think I try and make the language as relatable as possible. And often the way that I write is how is a direct relation to how I think, certainly, like frantic thoughts in the editing hardly changed at all. It’s almost like verbatim. I remember the day significantly, and I just, I just had to write it, and pretty much wrote it as it exists now, whereas some of the other pieces that I started right at the beginning of the pandemic, have gone through a lot more editing and have morphed and changed. I remember as well, they’ve been used in different circumstances. So during the pandemic, when I was seeking support, you often see a different service, different like support person, and it can get really repetitive, having to go through the whole of your condition to each different person that you see. This is really difficult especially when it’s not particularly, you know, not a particularly nice thing to have to talk through or traumatic, etc. So in one of the one of these pieces of writing began as almost like a list that I could give to a new person and be like, here you are. This is it on a sheet of paper, rather than me having to go into detail about everything, and it also kept me right in the sense that, like I knew that I’d covered everything, because a list of my obsessions can go on for quite a long time.

Obviously that is not in the publication but they the different, you know, they have kind of morphed into different, different shapes and forms. And I think I was very, yeah, very conscious of the visualness of them and how, like, I think the readers have really done an amazing job of kind of translating what was on the page, and in a way that’s made it like clearer to me, how I how I’ve written, it has been really conscious, you know.

RACHEL 

So for people that don’t have copies of the publication, frantic thoughts has laid out quite densely.

HELEN 

Yeah, it’s justified on the page. So it seems very kind of tight and condensed. And that very much relates to how it was as I was writing and as I was going through that day.

Speedy Gonzales is based on a little story that when I go and visit my parents, I often need kind of time out. One of my mechanisms to have escape time is to go on a walk. And when I go on a walk, I am in my own head, like I just my legs move, and I just go, and I solve all of today’s problems in my walk, I plan what I’m having for dinner in my walk. You know, a lot happens in that walk time, which often means that I miss people. And so if I ever walk straight past you, please don’t be offended. It’s it is, I’m just in my own world. And when I go and visit my parents, I got a reputation of being called Speedy Gonzales because one of my mum’s friends once said to her, You know what, you’re Helen. She just walked straight past me. That’s Speedy Gonzales, kind of just like stuck with me.

RACHEL 

Fantastic. I really appreciate those insights as well into how other people see you. Yeah, I’m going to open up questions to the floor, but I just want to ask you one more question. So this is labeled the thing part one, What’s your hopes for this, for this writing, for this collection?

HELEN 

Well, I’ve got a load of backlog of bits of the thing, yeah. And the theme Part one is a selection of stuff that I have written, but my aim is to revisit some of the earlier work, and obviously I’m keeping writing so to do more things, so there’ll be more parts, and my hope Is that I will be following a similar format, in the sense of maybe, like three colors, there will be a rainbow of things. Who knows? But definitely, there’s plenty more out there to delve into.

RACHEL 

The color, yeah, spectrum, almost like a whole spectrum of you and your experiences, yeah? Oh, brilliant. Well, I’m going to open our questions to the floor. Has anybody got anything you’d like to ask?

AUDIENCE

So thank you so much. This has been so nice to hear more about it, having full disclosure worked with you, but not in depth.

I just would love to say more about how personal the texts are and like as I really relate as an artist, I think I often put things in my work that I wouldn’t necessarily offer up to a stranger, kind of facts about myself or things that I’ve done. And yeah, I would love to know if it sort of feels like a confessional and like if that feels exposing, or if it’s kind of cathartic, or, yeah, I think it’s something that I often it’s like a conundrum for me.

HELEN

I know, there’s plenty of days when I think, Oh, is this self indulgent? Is this, you know, relatable at all? And it just keeps coming back to the fact that the more honest that I have been, the more genuine connection that people have like, the more that people have like responded positively to that. And so I almost just have to kind of back that, that kind of critical nature of myself out and say, Look, I have obviously made a connection with people through this. So it is worth doing. How successful that is. There’s some days when I can do that, there’s other days when I can’t. And really my intention is, to improve understanding. Thankfully awareness is a lot better of these issues. Certainly, you know, when I first began treatment for an eating disorder, 20 years ago, the service has so much developed now. For instance it’s only in December last year that I was diagnosed with autism, and the two were kind of really, really linked, and a lot of the behaviors that previously had been attributed to anorexia, like my moving actually is a stimming behavior, which is now linked to the autism. So awareness and understanding is improving, but I still think that there’s quite a lot that we can still learn. Some of the things like bladder issues, you know, are embarrassing. Like taking out my keys and then the jingle of the keys [makes me] wet myself. If any of my neighbours were here, they’d probably see me like, going, [moves her body in a way to depict needing the toilet] awkwardly as I reached the door. I guess the more that it’s open, the more that these issues are talked about, the more that we have the power to change things, and the more that then can be done to support people. So personally, I think that the Job Center incident is a prime example. Not have toilets at a Job Center is just outrageous, and that if there’s one thing that The Thing does, it’s to raise that as an issue. Because I’m sure it’s not just me that could see that has been a benefit, you know? So, yeah, it is tricky. I do feel very vulnerable. I do feel like there’s days when am I sharing too much, and you know, am I, is this? Is this self indulgent? And then it’s thanks to you lot here today and feedback that I have received that actually kind of persuading myself know this, that you know, my intention is for it to be helpful. My intention is to make change and for it to be positive thing, and that’s why I’ll keep doing it.

AUDIENCE

The online diaries that you’ve been doing, they’re obviously very simple, black and white, yes, and yet color is such a big part of your art. Were you ever tempted to put flashes of color in there?

HELEN

Yes, but as they’ve progressed, but I like the fact that now they’ve gotten that visual identity. And if I’m completely honest, there’s days when I just wouldn’t have time. It takes me an incredibly long time at the end of the day to do them, and in some in some ways, adding, adding color would, I wouldn’t have time to do that. Barbara, And yeah, and I’m kind of reluctant to change the format of them, if I’m totally honest. And maybe they Yeah, that there’s some, there’s something about the simplicity of them and that makes them more accessible. You know, anyone can pick up a black biro or a pen and do it without needing loads more equipment, you know? I’ve not been overly tempted, I must admit, because to me, they are what they are, kind of thing.

RACHEL 

And you’ve got such a you’ve got such a sensibility for color in your work that I wonder whether there’s just something a bit more direct for you working black and white. So it’s immediate and direct.

HELEN 

yeah, yeah, quite raw, yeah.

RACHEL

And whether if you introduce color, you’d be tempted to labor over them in a way that felt less immediate.

HELEN 

Maybe there’s elements of them, a bit like the writing, how the writing stemmed from the diary. If there’s anything that I feel like could be the start of a piece of work, then I would make a separate piece of work from that, involving color, rather than within the diaries. Does that make sense?

RACHEL

That is just making me think about your titling of this work. Would you want to say a bit about that?

HELEN 

I never enjoy titling work. I find titling work really difficult. As I began writing this, I opened a Word document, and then had to think of the title, and then it was this really long word document. I mean, it’s about 80 pages, because it was just me filling stuff out that I needed to get on my page and so I just put The Thing. And then the more and more that in the diaries I started writing, worked on The Thing. And then people started asking me, what is The Thing and then I started thinking, What should I call this thing? I just kept thinking back to this thing, and it’s got such a physical entity to it. Like, it’s problematic, and it doesn’t fit anywhere, and you lug it around in my backpack, and, its in my brain. And it’s always there, and I don’t really understand it fully, and it morphs, and it’s annoying, and it’s this weight, but it’s also it kind of on my shoulder at times. It’s like a helpful little thing. I mean Grainne and I sometimes we’ve had comical conversations where you end up saying “thing” more than you, more than you think that you could manage “thing” in a sentence.

RACHEL 

It’s like, it holds space for all that contradiction.

HELEN 

And then there’s the work thing and the exercise thing. And they all belong to this bigger thing. And it just is, just seems like it’s the right term for it. Yeah, it’s really physical.

RACHEL 

That’s really interesting now thinking about how it actually does exist as a physical thing, yeah, it’s a publication that’s been made tangible, yeah, these experiences and thoughts that you’ve been carrying around, yeah, and it will just be portioned off into different parts, you know? So, yeah, it will be The Thing Part Two.

Do you have a question?

AUDIENCE

I was just trying to follow on from that kind of thought. One of the things I was speaking about when I was hearing readings and questions was a sense of tension, of the push and pull, sort of a change of mode from living life, being an artist, being a great reflection, but also having to present oneself, is having these encounters of care, but also having decent counter uncare as well. Just thinking about how, yes, the Thing Part one is its own account of Helen’s experience. But I was also thinking about how it allows room for expansion, for further growth.

But I was also interested in the delineation boundaries between the visual practice. And I thought there is little simple drawings and the writing, or in the diaries, for the very least, hearing about the color practice, I was thinking about where did the boundary come in, and did these comments of this too much to share? This is not enough to share. This is and did. There’s always this little bit of decisions, choices, instant tense decisions are taken out of patent. And I wonder if this so?

RACHEL

I sort of wondered, just based on what X’s saying there, basically about the branching as well of your use of metaphor about branching. You talked a little bit about advocacy, and it kind of feels that part of what you were maybe referencing was the fact that you presenting your experiences hell in such a truthful and candid way is also like indicative of much bigger problems. Much bigger systemic problems. So you talk there about, for example, not having access to toilets at a job center. Do you see yourself kind of taking the work on and maybe, or seeing yourself potentially as an advocate for other people living with eating distress?

HELEN 

Yeah, and certainly artED is a platform for doing so. I am going to be inviting for other people to contribute to it. I think one of the intentions for artED is for it to be a conversation and a community as well, so that other people experiencing different lived experiences of neurodiversity, autism, eating distress, have a community where we can share these things and share creativity as well, because it’s It very much is a creative project. It’s not just a health project, and it is rooted in creative practice.

I will be inviting for contributions, and artED will be a platform to share other people’s experiences, and I’m looking forward to having that dialog and that discussion, and I wholeheartedly hope that it is a platform. I really do hope that it is a way of starting more meaningful conversations and generating discussions that are beyond what have already been started. And hopefully online is a good place for that.

RACHEL 

Creating that forum that maybe you’d started to feel or to sense through, like posting the diaries.

HELEN 

Yeah, exactly. Connection. And you know, I am one of many, and one of many that has very varied experiences, and I’m sure that there’s plenty of people out there that have experiences that they don’t feel, that they’re able to share right now, but hopefully knowing that they’re part of a bigger thing that they and a safe place, you know, where people are non judgmental and wanting to support each other, can then be a bigger force for change. That’s the hope.

AUDIENCE

It also brings up questions about how, because I think there’s something about how, when you’ve been trained in visual arts, but you try to portray something that’s much, trying to discuss something in the visual practice may not be enough of a language, then going into another form of practice, with writing, brings up that aspect of being able to talk about something in a way that may not be as strong a muscle.

HELEN

I was having to be a bit more blunt sometimes. Art practice may be more vague or whatever, and sometimes it is just about, we just need a toilet. I don’t want to have to draw a toilet, you know, or make a sculpture of a toilet. I just want to say, “Can I have a toilet at Job Centers”, but if my means of doing that is in some way a vision as a visual artist, so be it. I’m not really one for, like, discrete categories. I’m a multidisciplinary artist for a reason, I’m not a sculptor, I’m not a painter, I’m a multidisciplinary artist. I don’t mind if I’m an advocate, I’m a human, I happen to have blue eyes… Semantics are semantics, aren’t they? But if I could just make some change, then that’s it. That’s good.

RACHEL 

You bring so much humanity and truth to your work as well. And no doubt, with the launch of our end as well, at the end of the month.

HELEN

I’d like to pick up on what you said about boundaries. There are definitely things that I don’t talk about. There’s other things, like my family, I am very conscious that you know that the situation is between me and them and that’s not something that I share about in the public. I’ve got to look after my family at the end of the day. I speak my truth, so when it affects me, I can speak, but I’m not speaking other people’s truth. And I would hope that any mentions of anyone in my diary, they’re either like, objective or positive, you know. And I never bad mouth. So if any of you don’t want to be mentioned in the diaries, please say!

Closing remarks and thanks: Grainne and Helen