I find being reflective in my creative work incredibly useful and have done for many years. In this essay / podcast I share how I came to reflective writing or journalling and some of the other ways I am reflective about my work with others. This was part of my Cultures of Care Group in May 2024. You can read my essay below or listen to the podcast if you prefer.
The June Cultures of Care Group session is open for bookings now, and I would love it if you could join me then.
I’ve also developed a Reflective Writing for Creative Practice course. It includes three months of prompts and advice for developing your own reflective writing / journalling around a creative practice, business or other creative work. We begin 28th June.
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Download the full transcript here
Nineteen years ago I left my job as education officer at the V&A Museum. Three days later I was a self-employed designer-maker, at least in theory. In reality I was a museum freelancer back in my old workplace for a few months while I found my feet. In between those zero-hours contracts I was in my studio (my bedroom!) and working away at making things from the stash of vintage fabrics I had been building up. I felt rather at sea because I hadn’t been self-employed before, I was not used to making all the decisions about my developing business by myself and realised I needed a bit of structure. I started using a studio notebook, writing down what I was making and what I learned in the process, what I might sell and who and where I might sell it. I began to write down everything I did for the business: things I applied for, what I had learned from going to talks and development sessions. I joined a course in London about developing a craft business and I made copious notes on my train journeys home each week. I reflected on what had worked and what was a wildly optimistic stab in the dark and what was actually utterly pointless and a waste of money, or so I realised some months later. Without intending to, I had created a business journal. Reading back every few weeks or months taught me so much, it helped me recognise what I was doing right and where I was wasting effort. A year or so into my business I discovered blogs – the early days of sharing your work on the internet, and I fell deep into the rabbit hole of sewing and artist blogs, reading 10 or 20 a day and writing my own, all on my dial-up internet connection! In those early years blogging took the place of my studio notebook. It’s all still there, starting in 2006 and continuing pretty steadily until about 2010 when other things took over. It’s quite a thing to look back on and see what I was working on in 2006 or 2007, a truly self-reflective exercise in seeing how far I have come in some ways and also to see how much the same I am too. Eventually of course social media took the place of blogging as my place to share what I’m doing, but that’s so much harder to look back on and browse, as well as being much less honest and raw than the smaller-audience of blogging, let alone the privacy of my studio notebooks.
The seed of reflective practice was sown though. I had learned through doing, learned that writing about what I was doing, thinking things through and making notes or considering decisions or working things out on paper was a useful process for me. I had kept diaries from my early teens and sporadically throughout my 20s so I knew the power of writing down how you are feeling and just getting some of that stuff out. The same goes for business and creative practice as it does for friendships and relationships. Running a business, having a creative practice, is very emotional. There’s a lot of soul-searching and the need for reflection and self-analysis. Allowing the time and space to do this is a care practice. Having the space and time to do this is a privilege and I know not everyone will have the time and capacity to reflect. In the middle years of my business I worked 60+ hours a week and I had no energy left to think, reflect and write things down so there’s a huge gap in my recording of what I was doing and feeling. It’s not just that I was not recording what was happening, I wasn’t having the space to think about how this was not sustainable and I was not doing what I wanted to be doing with my days. I did not have enough care for my own creativity. The over-work, unsustainable projects and cycle of just getting on with it continued for a few years until my health got so fragile that I had to make a change – I stopped the majority of my teaching work in 2015 and took the financial hit that giving up half an income produces.
However, this is a good news story! With the time and mental space I had freed up, I was able to be more reflective and think about how I wanted the next decade of my career to be. I made use of the people I had around me to help work things out. I had conversations with other artists in my peer group, I talked to curators and artist development professionals, I saw business coaches and advisors, I had mentoring through some funding and I joined groups and created collectives and I raised funding and I asked a lot of questions, both of others and of myself. I started to run artist development courses and sessions around goal setting and developing project practice. I started doing what I wanted to be doing and sharing my experiences and ambitions. I was honest with myself and with everyone I worked with and talked to and through this process I worked out who Ruth Singer the artist with a chronic illness actually was, wanted to be and could become.
Reflective practice can be so many things, from internal like writing to external like these conversations I’m remembering. It can be journalling, talking to peers and professionals are the most effective self-care practices I’ve seen in this creative world. Journalling (or writing, to make it sound less complex), and talking to peers, are also the most affordable and accessible. Writing particularly is something you can control yourself, you don’t rely on anyone else to be there, to listen, to have anything useful to say and you can do it anywhere and any time, for 10 minutes a week or an hour a day. To find a peer group you may need to pay to join a group or course but you may find your people in free spaces like this here or on social media. The key is to make a start, and then just keep going. Gaps and breaks and pauses are all part of life, just start again when you feel like it.
The peer groups I built up in those years have sustained and nourished me in ways that are hard to quantify. We don’t do the same kind of work, mostly, we don’t have the same kind of lives or health issues but there is so much we can learn from each other. That learning, that reflection and thought leads to more self-awareness, more self-belief and ultimately more resilience.
The artist support world, where I often spend a lot of time, is full of talk about resilience. It’s tough out there trying to develop a practice and earn a living and deal with all the challenges and rejections and failures and broken promises that come with a creative career. They talk about resilience as thought it’s something you can just acquire, just chose to be. Of all the skills and aptitudes necessary to be an artist, no-one really teaches resilience, or even suggests how you might get to be more resilient. Capitalism & patriarchy teaches us that we have to take hard times on the chin and that’s how we become more resilient. We have to experience the failures, the rejections and we have to toughen up. Don’t take it personally! they tell us, like that ever really works. Difficult things tend to break us more rather than make us stronger, on the whole, and creative practice is no different. What I do think is possible though is that through reflective practice, through allowing the time and space to work things out, we can become more resilient in regard to our creative work and our development as creative people.
There is of course this myth that creative people are just having a lovely time doing what they love, but honestly the struggle of over-thinking every business or creative decision is hardly a recipe for having a lovely time. It’s all personal when it’s your own work, your values and beliefs under the microscope.
Like I said about research in the previous session, there’s no one-size fits all with reflective practice. There’s just finding your own way and being honest and committed to it. It does require consistency and it is hard. There’s no shortcut to learning, building self-knowledge, understanding your own practice, needs, motivations and ambitions but it is absolutely worth the effort. With reflection comes increased self-belief, faith in your own work and slow building of that resilience muscle. It doesn’t happen all in one go. A month of journalling or a session of mentoring doesn’t produce fully-formed resilience six-pack any more than a gym membership and one exercise class does for your body. Growth and change takes time. Giving yourself that time, that space, that commitment to developing is worthwhile. Through working on reflection and learning from yourself and from others, we can build self-belief and resilience which make the next stage of growth and development a tiny bit easier. Reflective practice builds over time. It might not feel any better at first but it does work, if you practice it like you would to learn any other thing that you really want to master. I’m not suggesting that journalling is going to solve all troubles but it is brilliant for sorting through work and creativity challenges. Speaking out loud, articulating what’s in your head or writing it down are really effective ways of working things out.
A lot of my reflective practice is self-mentoring: asking myself questions like “what is is about this thing that is making me avoid it?” “Is there a way I can change the thing or my mindset to make it all feel more possible?” Other times my journalling is a stream of consciousness and just getting thoughts out of my head and letting it flow without judgement. Yes I read things back and I make a note of what’s important, interesting and relevant, but I don’t judge my past self for feeling those things and having those thoughts. Reflection is not about analysing your faults and flaws and beating yourself up about them. It’s about noticing, understanding and learning.
Reflective practice is a deep-rooted care practice that has long-lasting and wide benefits to you as an individual and to your wider creative community. Modelling a practice of self-awareness, self-care and steadily-built resilience helps others to see and understand what they need to work on. Being a more resilience, reflective and self-aware artist helps me support others better, and likewise any reflective artist can support their peers and group members better too, and be better supported by others with an open approach and self-understanding in the mix.
Despite all of this, I do not believe that it is always the artist, the individual’s responsibility or job to be resilient in the face of bad practice from the organisations, galleries and systems that are supposed to support us. This self-work should be in addition to meaningful and accessible support from agencies and funded bodies that are there because of the work of artists. Some places are doing this, or trying to learn how to do it better, but they are in sharp contrast to the sector as a whole which is so lacking in care for the creatives that they rely on as to be positively undermining the self-belief, value and resilience that we are working so hard to develop. That’s the subject of another talk though, because I have a lot to say on creative organisations and care.
There is a huge power in this reflective practice. It is self-directed, so you get to work on whatever is most important or relevant to you right now. It can be responsive and proactive. You can figure out challenges you are facing at this moment, your responses to situations you are in or you can think about how you’ve responded and reacted to situations previously and why you’ve made certain decisions, and then what you can learn from this for your future choices.
This care practice also fits into my model of the cycle of curiosity, connection and care. By being curious about our own motivations, aspirations, doubts and blockages we are all to create a deeper connection to our inner artist, our creative soul. By connecting with this, feeling truly fascinated by our own thinking processes, we learn to care for that inner artist, that creative soul. And through that curiosity, that connection (or engagement) we can learn more self-knowledge, more self-compassion, more belief in our work and more resilient.
Learning to respect your own way of working, thinking, changing, developing and moving forward is care. Recognising what is your own stuff and what is external is care. Being honest but fair with yourself is care. Exploring what you really think and feel about your work, how it is seen by others and how you express your ideas, is care. You may not find this kind of care in other places. No-one else knows exactly why you react so emotionally to a tiny enamelled swan pendant in a museum. We need to give ourselves this care, we need to give our creative practice this amount of care, because no-one else does, and no-one else can.
Ruth Singer 
Let me know what you think