I do not, it’s fair to say, present as frivolous. All those words like frothy and frilly and frou-frou, they just don’t fit me.

And let’s spell it out: these words are associated overwhelmingly with that other f-word, femininity, which from an early age has been a problematic space for me to occupy.

I was a terribly earnest child, and now that I’m a grown woman you’ll rarely find me hanging around at the hyperfeminine end of the spectrum. I can glam up with the best of them, but when I do, the result tends to be more Lady Macbeth than Disney Snow White, if you see what I mean.

So let me tell you the story of my vanity case

This is a sad little story, quite inconsequential in the grander scheme of things, but close to my heart (a) because it features eight-year-old me and (b) because it touches on something pretty deep in my relationship with making.

So. All the way back in the last millennium – 1983, to be specific, I entered an essay competition sponsored by the Irish Milk Board.

In what was perhaps the first of many such feats of approval-magnetism, I based my work closely on the literature provided by the sponsor – so closely, in fact, that it felt uncomfortably like cheating.

(All I did, after all, was take the information given, restructure it, translate it into Irish, and illustrate the result. No peer-reviewed primary research or anything.)

Lo and behold, my essay won a prize.

A little in advance of the awards ceremony, I had to declare which of their enticing range of prizes I wanted. I don’t recall much about the list, other than that it consisted mostly of toys.

But it included one mysterious and alluring item: a “vanity case”.

A vanity case!

Surely – surely! – this must be a treasure beyond imagining: a magical container full of the sparkliest, froofiest, pinkiest-and-purpliest, glitteriest and goldiest and forbiddenest of pleasures!

I pictured eye-shadows, lipsticks, mysterious scented powders, sequins and rhinestones.

(In my world, such things were the stuff of fantasy. One of my grandmothers wore a little make-up more days than not, but that was the solemn height of it.)

Well. Ignoring the fractionally raised eyebrow of my teacher, I chose the vanity case, and off I went to collect my prize.

Picture me, standing on a broad stage in a dark echoey hall, squirming in the spotlight with guilty anticipation as I wait for my coffer of radiant delights to be bestowed upon me.

You can see where this is going, right?

What they handed me that afternoon, dear reader, under those dazzling stage lights, was a small, plain brown suitcase, with rounded corners and a metal clasp.

Sturdy.

Serviceable.

And completely empty.

*a pause as we contemplate with our adult ironic distance the cheesy symbolism of that*

I used the ugly vanity case for years to carry my personal things on family holidays. (Did I mention brown is my least favourite colour?)

I knew I could never breathe a word of my bitter disappointment – because then people would know of my shameful secret yearnings, and also because I’d been wrong.

VANITY CASE.

How much heartache the promoters of that competition might have saved if only they’d called it something else!

Shameful secret yearnings, you say?

Yes, let’s come back to those, because they are what prompted me to write about this.

The relationship between vanity and shame – and the shaming of perceived vanity – is pretty central to my experience of femininity.

Part of me is deeply ashamed of my love of softness, shininess, luxury and froth. And I constantly have to negotiate with this shame in order to make the beautiful things I want to make.

The balance of the struggle has fluctuated over the years, but it’s definitely become more complicated as I’ve got older, because the Real Grown-Up Responsibilities to which I should at all times be directing my attention have become more pressing.

For example, I have difficulty allowing myself to work on soft household items (cushions, curtains) while hard items (walls, shelving) remain unfinished.

This is of course a gendered dichotomy (hammer drill versus sewing machine), and I wonder what effect that has had on my efforts to find a better balance. I do love my power tools, but there is a certain defiance, a certain I’m-as-good-as-the-boys-ness about my enthusiasm for them.

What I need is somehow to empower the tools on the other side of the fence – quilting foot, seam ripper, embroidery hoop, needle gauge – and get my inner patriarch to shut up while I create beauty all around me, for the sheer hell of it.

Feels kind of subversive, when I put it like that.

I’m very fond of metaphors – which is not strange, given my line of work. In their sideways approach to a subject, they can often unlock meanings that aren’t obvious on the face of it.

Metaphorically unlock, that is. (You see what I did there. You love it.)

Here’s a metaphor I find useful when thinking about creative work: the Blaze and the Shimmer.

The Blaze

… is the work.

Imagine that your creativity is a roaring bonfire, sparking and burning in all the shades of red and orange and yellow, deep and bright, leaping in long tongues with flickering hearts of azure and lilac, endlessly fascinating and delightful, providing heat and inspiration and nourishment and joy.

And (this is important) consuming fuel.

Your blaze needs fuel. In order to do your creative work, you must feed your creative fire.

Perhaps you already know what fuelling strategies work best for you – in which case, do them.

If you’re not sure, try one or more of these and see how you go:

1. Encounter some art – whether in your own disciplines or outside them doesn’t matter. This could be as simple as listening to a favourite song, or as dramatic as travelling to another country to see a big exhibition.
2. Read for pleasure – give yourself an evening or a day or a weekend to gulp down your favourite kind of book. Guilt-free, any genre, any style. Pick whatever turns the pages almost without your noticing and sends you deep into a state of flow.
3. Have sex – by which I mean enjoy intense physical pleasure in whatever way makes sense to you. Doesn’t have to be with anyone else, either. So there. Why not try your hand at something new? (Yes, I wrote that out loud.)
4. Finger-paint – not a euphemism (although? … no). What I mean is make some blobby, scribbly child-art: messy, immediate, imperfect. Actual paint on your fingers is not a firm requirement here; spontaneity is.
5. Get quiet – by which I kind of mean “meditate”, but that term has baggage. The simplest way to do this is to close your eyes and breathe, slowly, down past your ribs, in through the nose and out through the mouth, paying attention to the sensations. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. You’re done. Go further if you feel like it.
6. Go outside and find something green or blue – leaves or water. Rock and sky work too. The wilder the better, but even a spindly tree waving gamely at the traffic is worth pausing to look at, to touch.

Make time for these things in your life. This week. Today, if you can.

They will allow you to get down into your specific furrow and engage hands-on with your art, to give of yourself what is required.

Creative work is not easy work, people.

The Shimmer

… is what happens above the blaze.

If your creativity is a bonfire, the shimmer inhabits the air above it, setting it trembling and dancing in oily coils and curtains of haze.

The shimmer changes the view through to the landscape beyond.

Imagine that the shimmer is the effect your creative work has on the world. No other person – not now, not ever – has your particular artistic perspective.

You make art, and that changes the view.

Never doubt that.

Remember

Please do not confuse cause and effect. The blaze produces the shimmer, not the other way around. To put it another way: the shimmer does not fuel the blaze.

It’s easy to get seduced by the shimmer, to start half-believing that focusing on the shimmer helps with the art-making.

It doesn’t.

By all means, do shimmer-related work, when it’s time to do that. Find your audience, make yourself visible, publicise your work as hard as you can personally bear.

But don’t forget, you’ve got to make blaze to produce shimmer.

You’re going to want to produce shimmer, of course. Shimmer is a large part of why we do this.

The essential aim of creative expression, after all, is to communicate meaning, to reveal your unique viewpoint. That’s all shimmer.

Moreover, when people buy your work, the shimmer is what they’re paying for.

And yet you must remember that the blaze is where the work is. More than that, in fact: you cannot really control the shimmer much, if at all.

What you can do is tend the blaze, and do the work.

Go to it.

There’s a line in a Sherlock Holmes story where the great detective remarks, “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Greek Interpreter”, 1893)

I don’t know about blood, necessarily. But strangeness? The seething, intricate, magnificent diversity of what we humans dream up and choose to make real? Definitely.

This is Strange Forms, where I write about all aspects of creativity and creative work as I experience it, and tell stories that may go some way towards explaining what has me the way I am. If you’re creative – in any discipline – or you want to be, this might be an interesting place for you.

If you want to reconnect with your own creativity, you might like my free 7-week e-course, Reboot Your Creative Drive, which comes with access to my mailing list, such as it is. (Why am I being so weirdly equivocal about that? It’s complicated.)

I’m very bad at social media, but trying to give Mastodon a go.