Self-Filling Rolls

On creative confidence

I’ve been writing a lot this month. For the past five years making literally anything has felt increasingly pointless, painful and embarrassing. To the point where going to my studio or opening a sketchbook feels a bit like Ant and Dec are telling me to drink a pint of leeches’ testacles. For a person whose income comes almost entirely from selling the things that they make, as you can imagine this has become a little problematic. I don’t by any stretch of the imagination think I am the only person who experiences this. In fact when I’m having a drink and conversation (moan) with other people who sell their creative wares, I’m often struck by how normal it is for all present to describe daily hair-ripping, suicidal adjacent depressions that throw said individual’s every creative deed - future and historical - into a whirling well of melodramatic interrogation. So I don’t believe myself to be alone in this, but I do remember a time when I was far better equipped to protect myself from succumbing to the pain of it.

I was named for two film characters- Scarlett O’Hara and Eliza Doolittle. Both confident to the point of cluelessness, and I very much followed suit. As a child, during my grandfather’s 70th birthday party, I ordered the music to be turned off, and told the crowd of 50 or so people to be silent and watch me spin around in my polka-dot skirt, which apparently went on for an uncomfortably long time. As a teenager, when my friends told me they felt anxious about something, I advised them sagely and simply to choose not to feel the anxiety. When I reached university I leaped at the opportunity to write terrible poetry and the same evening read it in my booming and enunciated English accent to an audience of Scottish poets. I was genuinely convinced of everyone’s favour towards me, having come from a family of adoring parents and grandparents who constantly supported and encouraged me, laughing at my jokes as they placed a tenner in my palm. 

When I graduated I came to live back in London. I was burned for the first time when a music video I made was rejected by the artist, a friend of mine but also a teenage boyfriend who had broken my heart at eighteen- which didn’t help. I had been convinced I would be a filmmaker. Having made (bad) experimental films throughout my painting degree, I’d naturally assumed I would fly through the directing ranks, get a couple of BAFTAs under my belt in the next few years and probably be interviewed on stage by Mark Kermode after the preview of my first feature film when I was around thirty. But upon receiving my first rejection I was so deeply hurt and shocked that I immediately stopped making films at all. I even stopped watching anything I might find inspiring, sticking to rewatches of bland blockbusters with two star reviews. I was like a frustrated child who tries riding a bike for the first time without stabilisers, falls off it, throws it to the ground, finds a pin and deflates the tyres, uses an allen key to take it apart and distributes the mangled sections of it as far and wide as possible. As err.. as children are famously liable to do. 

Booting the filmmaker dreams to the back of the cupboard, I started an Etsy business. I’d never worked with ceramics and hadn’t handled a paintbrush in years, but I decided to paint portraits of people on to dinner plates, with porcelain paints that you could fire in the oven. It became an enormous success within weeks. The painted plates were featured in Vogue and I was receiving commissions from celebrities like Kate Moss and Hugh Grant after a few months. Phew, I thought, back to normal.  

I used my healthily swelling following on instagram to broadcast my every inner thought to my stories. ‘Here!’ I cried as I threw the crumbs of idea from my guilded carriage- ‘here is what I think of lip injections! And here- see how I feel about tax reductions for boat owners! Have some of this- photos of my naked body with a list of my favourite books published in 2018 pasted across it!’ Astoundingly, people loved it. I’m sure not everyone did but if anyone told me otherwise I was deaf to the noise. My self- assurance knew no bounds. I was beautiful, I was hilarious, I was talented. Who could argue with that?

The painted plates I made were mostly commissions: I did a passable portrait of so and so, surrounded by some personal artefacts and in a place they liked, twisted into a fun and highly saturated little composition on a twenty-five centimetre dinner plate with a gold rim. I also made my own designs- bold looking naked or underwear clad women with armpit hair, witty little details placed around them in tightly packed vignettes of youthful female life. They were quite good, I got much better at rendering characters and they even had a little depth to them. They were hashtag feminist, hashtag strong, hashtag accessible art that was easily digestible, fairly affordable and you could find out absolutely everything about the artist that made them by following her on instagram.

At almost the exact same time, three things converged: first, I met my partner Theo. He was an artist, the son of a painter and he ran a gallery in Liverpool. Our dates consisted of long walks around London and Liverpool where he asked me all about my practice. What did it mean to me? What were my dreams and ambitions for it? I was embarrassed that under questioning I didn’t have much to say about my plates. I also started being asked to display my ceramics in actual art galleries, with other real artists who were passionate about their (worryingly good) work. Suddenly I began to view my work in a totally different and much more serious context. Next to these other works my painted crockery looked stupid, superficial and sugary. Galleries asked me to name artists I loved and who inspired me for their exhibition texts and I shamefully reeled off the truth- Paula Rego, Cindy Sherman, Jim Jarmusch, Angela Carter and Leonard cohen… these were the people that inspired me, but they had barely anything to do with the illustrative, one dimensional cartoons which I now saw with horrifying clarity were my legacy. 

The third convergence was the death of my mother. My confidante, the person I lived with and a genuine believer in my ability to do absolutely anything I wanted. She vanished, and suddenly the Pandora’s box of self doubt was open. Within weeks of my mum’s death I began to see the underbelly of my personality. I stayed awake for hours at night vibrating with mortifying realisations. For the first time in my life, at twenty five, I understood the pain of self consciousness that most people had been suffering with since childhood. I had two and a half decades of embarrassment and self loathing to catch up on. I was selfish, thoughtless, stupid, talentless and shockingly arrogant. My work was shallow and tasteless, I had whistled through life as a privileged, ignorant, luck-dusted idiot. To top it off I felt that my arrogance and self absorption had removed me from seeing or loving or caring for my mum in the way that I should have. I completely stopped my commissions, quartering my income with one fell swoop. I started refusing any requests for anything to do with the plates, which by this point were overwhelming. The plates had started off costing £50, but now they were going for £500. Take paintings of naked and hot young women, put them on an accessible object that can span art and homeware, market them with a white girl transposing personal and funny anecdotes over pictures of her face on an app that millions of people keep in their pocket and look at a hundred times a day… and you can really whip up a frenzy. I had created a monster. At one point I was receiving between fifty and a hundred emails and instagram messages per day asking me to sell plates.

I batted them all away, I didn’t have the time to be in my studio anyway. It fell to my brother and I to file for probate, clear our family house of all my mum’s possessions and sell it. I inherited some money and it allowed me to take a step back and consider. I wanted it to make things I cared about and work that I could respect. I tried painted scarves, tiled tables with Theo, murals, etching, tablecloths. But my business was built on the magnetic confidence I had myself exuded, it had been in the lines of my drawings, and now I could not recreate it. As Joan Didion put it: innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. I no longer possessed the ability to sell that particular fantasy. 

As my self knowledge dwindled my creativity became more inhibited. Walls rose up in front of my eyes every direction I turned in. I thought back to the last time I was creatively excited and applied to a masters in film direction and was rejected. I was rejected from arts council funding to make a film, I paid for a screenwriting course, found I was the worst person on it and left it early. In desperation I applied to a postgraduate degree in drawing and was rejected from that too. Each time I thought I would run out of money and have to make plates again another member of my family would die- my grandpa, my grandmother, my aunt. I collected some inheritance money each time the number of family members decreased, but the emotional trauma left me unbearably weak. With each person whom I loved so dearly disappearing so did my belief that life could be good. I was overwhelmed by the devastating truth that I could never again feel the warmth of my family’s belief, never seek comfort from hearing how they overcame past failures, never again draw strength from experiencing their talents. The good luck I’d had in early life was a bizarre fluke, and any future sustained financial creative success was so unlikely that there was barely a point in trying.

I somehow mustered the energy to focus in on oil painting for a whole year, dragging myself to the studio every day that I wasn’t working my job in my friend’s mum’s shop. I did improve but excruciatingly slowly. Every mark I made bore the weight of comparison to every painter that had ever existed, and every person I knew’s opinion. It was rare for me to break out of the tightness  this weight produced. The paintings were at least becoming more interesting than the plates. I was reading more literature, watching more films, trying hard to make things that had meaning. I sold a few paintings and was very glad of the money, as my inheritance would certainly not last forever. When my friends praised my new line of work and said they could see the paintings coming along I became uncomfortable. I couldn’t accept their compliments. I felt it would take me decades to become anywhere near as good as I wanted to be, and I was not going to fall into the foolish trap of self- respect, as that might lead to a repetition of my aforementioned artistic and personal embarrassments. I had lost nearly all of my youthful courage and conviction. 

I had a vague sense that in order to make good work I had to release myself from the opinions of others and weight of expectation, and simply enjoy making. But I couldn’t see how I could stop thinking about how others perceived me and my work when I needed to show the paintings to someone in order to make money, and be at least slightly responsive to what they wanted to buy. The people who were buying my joyful, brightly coloured girl power plates five years ago were not so interested in the shadowy gothic oil portraits I was making now. And my bouncy, good humoured insights on body positivity had long since been banished from my instagram stories, taking a few thousand followers with them.

The process of self actualisation with a fully developed prefrontal cortex takes a little more work and time than it did without. The abundance of sequin adorned, brittle self-esteem I cultivated as a young adult is sorely missed, but can only be lost once. Since my (now fiancé) Theo collapsed from a freak cardiac arrest and survived it against all odds six weeks ago (a story for another time) I’ve found myself writing more than I ever have. I think my younger self would advise me to ‘be aggressively myself’ in order to be less knocked about by the perceived judgements of others. But somewhere in the examining of my self in these years I judged too keenly, saw too many imperfections, and lost sight completely of what I liked about myself. This left me with very little to shelter with from storms of self doubt. These writings then, are my fleshing out of self. And posting them to a slightly depleted audience on substack is my vaccine against embarrassment. After all- who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe? 

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