Moving on

13 years ago, in the summer of 2012, I moved my looms into a top floor studio in Meadow Mill.

I’m old enough now that, in many ways, 13 years doesn’t feel to me like a particularly long time. We’ve lived in the same house for twice as long as that; been married for nearly three times (!) as long. But these particular 13 years have held a great deal of change, both for me personally and in the wider world, and the shape of my life and practice now is very different from the shape of my life and practice then.

And it is time to move on. Much as I have loved my Meadow Mill studios – and I’ve occupied three different studios over those years – the space is no longer the support to my work that it once was.

Since the pandemic, a series of eye-watering rent increases have made me look more sternly at my budget and ask hard questions about what I really need. To teach online, for instance, what I need is not a big space, but a fast and reliable internet service. My studio was great at the former, but my home is a whole lot better at the latter. So it’s been on my mind for a while that I should seriously weigh up my options, but while I was working on the manuscript for my book I couldn’t find any space in my head for Big Thoughts About The Future. Now that the publication process is underway (more on that soon!) and I have had a few months to ponder, I found my concerns basically came down to two main themes: the stuff and the people.

The stuff is quite an easy theme to address in principle, although time consuming in practice. Over the last three months I have done a LOT of pruning. Looms have been sold and given away, yarn and books have been donated, and a great deal of paperwork has been archived or shredded. We’ve carried out a similar exercise at home to make space here: shelves have been emptied, furniture carried off by the recyclers, and so on. There are a few weaving items which I don’t want to part with, but can’t currently accommodate: a small storage locker is taking care of those for now.

The people theme is a little bit more scary. When I was a new entrant into the creative industries, it was very isolating to work at home alone, and I didn’t like it at all. Moving into the studio meant I joined a community of other artists and makers, where I could learn, participate, collaborate and discover new opportunities that otherwise I would never have known about. There’s a part of me that is very nervous about giving that up.

But, as I said earlier, a lot has happened in these years. On the one hand, I have been extremely fortunate in the networks of connection I have been able to plug myself into within the city, across Scotland, with weavers around the world. On the other hand – in large part thanks to those rent increases – much of the community I valued in the building has already broken up and moved elsewhere. So if the question is people, Meadow Mill is not necessarily the answer.

I think the challenge to me here is to be intentional about how I use my time both inside and outside the studio, so that I am continuing to foster connection and not simply retreating into my weaving cave. Mind you, with exhibition deadlines coming up, a bit of intensive loom time might well be in order. What was that I was saying about balance?