Exhibitions and Finishing Energy

In the stress of getting ready for an exhibition, I wonder why I put myself through all this

The Opposite of Doing Nothing

I’ve just been part of an amazing group exhibition Tracing Intricacies at Webb’s and two days after the opening night, I flew out of Wellington to Timor-Leste, where I will be living for the next seven months or so.

When it was all at its most frenetic and stressful, I asked myself ‘Why am I even going through all this stress of exhibiting?’

(For anyone else considering it, moving country and exhibiting at the same time is not recommended)

Exhibiting makes you very afraid of everything that can go wrong (or it does to me anyway) - scared the art will get ripped or damaged - and very scared of people declaring it all rubbish and I should be ashamed to call myself an artist.

I realised that I actually didn’t have to exhibit at all! It’s a choice I decided to make along the way. And I can un-make that choice if I really want to.

I know a couple of artists who seem to have made that choice not to exhibit.

So why I am choosing to do this, and going through all this stress and fear. There must be a reason, beyond simple careerism!

Other people

The first reason, of course, is to share your work- the materiality of it - with other people.

This is vastly important, a train of thought worth its own post, but working towards this particular exhibition highlighted the forcing function of an art deadline.

The forcing function

Exhibiting is the crucible I need, forcing me to make decisions, to make them strongly, quickly, effectively.

It forces me to ask ‘Is this piece good enough?’ And find the reason why it is or isn’t. That’s a really important question, and the pressure of exhibiting pushes me hard to respond to that.

The fear I feel interferes intensely with this decision making, leaving me vibrating between ‘nothing is good enough’ and ‘I have to put ALL of the paintings up to prove I have done enough’

A hard path to navigate, but I think I get a little bit better at it each time.

Technical resolutions

Before I knew I was traveling this year, I had all sort of complex ideas about how I might get my very large lines to hang on the wall in the way I wanted. I was going to be testing all sorts of glueing and laminating methods I had dreamed up. It was a difficult, expensive, time consuming plan.

But when the opportunity for this particular exhibition came up with rather a short time line, I knew I had to get the existing paintings to hang on the wall effectively, right now.

Another gallery had sewn one of my lines on canvas and hung it on metal rods. It was a good solution, referencing the scrolls and Asian brush work that is important to me. I just did’t like the metal rods very much.

I had to find my bravery and take the paintings to a sailmaker (who was lovely) to sew up these paintings, and trust him not to get the paintings dirty or damaged, to sew neatly and unobtrusively and not sew over the paint marks I had made.

It is very scary to sew over already painted paintings!

I would never have risked that if I didn’t have an exhibition coming up.

The first set of timber battens I made didn't fit, so the day before the assigned delivery I had to stay up all night making another set of battens and hope that they would work.

It was finishing energy let me stay up all night, let me approach people I am scared to talk to, let me risk damaging the paintings to get things to work.

Finishing energy let me get done in two weeks what would have taken me months of dithering and pottering and likely getting nowhere much.

And it worked. It worked well.

Artificial deadlines

Finishing energy is so powerful I think we want it all the time so we create artificial deadlines.

Hence the horrible SMART goal, where you try to say you will lose precisely X kilos by precisely X date. SMART goals like these are attempting to get you to put finishing energy into your day to day life, the way you work, eat or move.

But I think it’s the wrong energy to use up in your daily life. It’s so powerful that trying to drum it up for day to day use leaves you will drained and burnt out.

The pace of finishing energy

Yearly

I try to push myself to make one exhibition (or some other form of publicly launched work) every year so I can access the willpower to refine projects, get them finished, and have the bravery to do the promotional work.

So I am inviting a good dose of finishing energy into my life, using self-set deadlines, but only where it matters most to me,in my art.

Monthly

And this Substack is another way of inviting finishing energy into my work.

Writing with a dose of finishing energy means the loose dreamy thoughts can cohere into packets, little bundles of ideas that can be shared and transmitted to others.

*Moving country left me pretty depleted, so the little bit of finishing energy needed to post this has been missing until now!

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Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is a worthwhile read and a bit of an instruction manual for planning on how to use finishing energy for big, important long term projects, rather than using it up on less meaningful, quick outcomes.

I also wrote about sitting and doing nothing, the opposite of pushing yourself through deadlines -