I have often wondered whether artists really know what they are trying to say when they begin a work.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they can tell you exactly why they are making something, where it came from and what they want you to see.
And sometimes they cannot.
I have sat across from artists who become visibly uncomfortable when asked to explain their work. They search for words. They start an answer and abandon it. They say, “I don’t know.”
I used to think that “I don’t know” meant they had not thought about it enough.
I don’t think that anymore.
In fact, I have begun to think that sometimes the opposite is true.
Perhaps they know too much.
Perhaps there are things going on inside the work that have not yet found a language.
This is one of the things that interests me about artists. They are often asked to explain things that they have chosen to express through another language entirely.
A painting is one language.
Clay is another.
Wood, photography, drawing, film, found objects, all of them have their own ways of saying things.
Yet we keep asking the artist to translate everything back into words.
Why did you make this?
What does it mean?
What are you trying to say?
Sometimes the artist has an answer.
Sometimes the work is the answer.
I have always been interested in the second kind.
There are artists whose work seems to know where it is going before they do. They begin with an instinct rather than a fully formed idea. Something bothers them, interests them or refuses to leave them alone. They start making.
The thinking happens along the way.
I recognise this in photography.
There have been many times when I have taken a photograph without being able to explain why I needed to take it. Something made me stop. A face. A gesture. A particular quality of light. Someone standing somewhere in a way that seemed important at that moment.
I take the photograph.
Only later do I sometimes understand what I was responding to.
Sometimes I never do.
I am comfortable with that now.
Perhaps this is why I find artists who insist they do not know what a work means more interesting than those who have a perfectly prepared explanation for everything.
The explanation can sometimes come too easily.
Art is rarely that neat.
I have watched artists return to the same subject for years. The same figure. The same landscape. The same architectural form. The same memory. Sometimes even the same image.
You wonder what keeps bringing them back.
Maybe they are obsessed.
Maybe they have found something that works.
Or maybe there is something unresolved.
I suspect it is often the last one.
There are things we carry for years without really understanding them. A relationship. A loss. A childhood memory. A place we left. A person we could not understand. Something that happened that we have never properly dealt with.
We do not necessarily talk about these things.
We may not even consciously think about them.
But they can find their way into what we make.
The artist may not sit down and say, “Today I am going to work through this particular memory.”
It can be much less conscious than that.
A shape appears.
A colour returns.
A particular material starts to feel necessary.
A photograph is made.
Then another.
And gradually something begins to emerge.
This is where I think art and mental health have a complicated relationship.
I don’t mean that making art cures anything.
It doesn’t.
And I am suspicious of the idea that suffering automatically makes better art. The romantic image of the tortured artist has done enough damage already.
But making can give a person a place to put something that has nowhere else to go.
That is different.
You don’t have to understand a feeling before you make something out of it.
You don’t even have to name it.
You can simply give it a form.
I have seen this happen with artists who are perfectly articulate about almost everything else in their lives but become strangely quiet when they talk about a particular body of work.
Sometimes I think that silence tells me more than the explanation would.
There is a point at which asking an artist to explain the work becomes almost intrusive.
Not every silence needs to be filled.
Not every artwork needs a statement.
Not every feeling needs to become a sentence.
This is something I have become more comfortable with in my own work.
I used to feel that if I could not explain why I had made a photograph, perhaps it was not a good enough reason to make it.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Sometimes I photograph because something has moved me before I have had time to understand why.
The understanding, if it comes, can come later.
Or not at all.
And perhaps that is fine.
We are too quick to assume that everything needs to be understood.
Some things need to be experienced first.
Maybe that is one of the reasons art exists.
It gives shape to things that language cannot quite hold.
Not because the artist has failed to explain them.
Because words were never the right medium for them in the first place.
I think about this when I sit with artists and look at their work.
There are moments when I stop asking questions.
I simply look.
Sometimes the artist looks too.
Neither of us says anything.
And strangely, those are often the moments when I feel I have understood the work a little better.
Not because I know what it means.
Because I can feel that there is something there.
Something the artist may not be able to say.
Something I may not be able to put into words either.
And perhaps it does not need to be said.
Perhaps it only needed to be made.