Selfish / Not Selfish
Which is more selfish - volunteering or making art?
Making art all day feels selfish. Most of the day I spend in my own space, doing more and more of what makes me happy. Ignoring everyone else is a big part of that work.
Requests for attention from my family, guilt about housework, about not making much money - all need to be ignored. That certainly feels selfish.
The other part that makes art seem even more selfish artist is the time I spend sending out to the world that I have made art, and maybe they might like to look at it. It all feels very self-centred, very ‘look at me’, to be doing that consistently (actually I am not very consistent, but I try)
A lot of the women artists I know find this feeling of selfishness incredibly difficult too.
We equate finding time to make art with finding time for ourselves. And maybe don’t give ourselves as much time in the studio as we would like.
For the last ten months I have been doing something completely different - volunteering in Timor-Leste. I’ve been working with Reloka, a group helping preserve Timor-Leste’s natural dye heritage. And I haven’t made any art at all.
So it has felt like a relief, a breather, for me to be thinking entirely about helping other women promote and improve their income from their indigenous art form, the tais. (see an excellent video here
Volunteering in a developing country means I make do with a lot less in my life. I live in a pretty basic house, with very few belongings, very little internet, very few shops, and all too often without electricity and water when the infrastructure fails. Physically it is all quite uncomfortable and devoid of all the little luxuries.
So of course all this feels very unselfish of me, in contrast to art making.
But it’s not that simple. While I am honestly spending my time doing the things I hope and trust will bring the best development outcomes to the group I am working with, I am getting so much for myself out of this. The withdrawal from over-stimulation and over-consumption benefits me hugely. The relationships I make in this other environment are clear and happy and bring me so much contentment.
I also get a lot of relief from my anxiety over the problems of the world. Focusing on this one small subset of the world’s huge set of problems gives me relief from that horrible feeling so much of us are experiencing ‘everything in the world is going wrong and I can’t do anything to fix it’ 1(footnote) A feeling that makes me constantly brittle and guilty back in New Zealand.
Doing this volunteer work, you kind of get a sense of perspective that has been very healthy for me. I suppose in terms of control and anxiety over the worlds problems it feels like you are living that prayer ‘give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other…’. I am doing what I can, it’s not that much in the big context, but I know the rest of it is out of my ability to touch, let alone fix.
And also it is just so much fun to be volunteering here! There are lots of novel problems to try and solve, which makes my brain so happy. Particularly this assignment - developing a dye garden and studio - I found a huge, delightful, new obsession with finding the hidden colours in the landscape. And the people I get to work with, I learn so much from them.
Now I have just back home in New Zealand.
Back to my studio at last, and back to an art practice.
Again spending all my time on what I want to do.
And spending time thinking about how this selfish following of my obsessions and desires is also perhaps not all selfish.
Art can do this thing, of transmitting feelings from one human to another, sometimes very clearly. And if I can mange to transmit all the peace and awe I work to develop in the studio, that could actually be a very unselfish thing to do.
And all the other artists, too, who are maybe struggling themselves in their studios. Bringing all the good things to the other humans.
I have added here by a work I made in 2015, ‘A Line’. I actually made this a few weeks before my first volunteer assignment to Timor-Leste. It took me nearly two years disassembling all the thoughts about what I ‘ought’ to be painting before I could bring it all down to my own joy in mark making.
A video by Timor Aid showing the entire process of tais weaving-
I drafted this before the problems Trump & Musk have recently created hit the world. Please, if you are American, please do what you can to help the situation (because all of us who aren’t US citizens can’t do this, it has to be you) and contact your representative about USAID and how valuable they are. I have spent a few years in the development area now and have seen first-hand how incredibly valuable the work USAID does.
It’s good to hear from you Helen. I’ve no doubt that you are far from selfish; you have I’m sure made a difference and will continue to do so. It’s interesting that artists so often debate this, when so many others in the world seem to think that it is perfectly okay to put their needs and wants first. Perhaps we need more artists…
I can't speak to your experience of course but in some ways everything we do in life could be seen as selfish or selfless highly dependant on the context and perspective. I do think that art making requires attention to self but also isn't necessarily always kind to the self. But part of creative practice in general is that it can have the promise of inhaling from our oxygen mask so that we might be that much more able to help someone else with their "breath".