My Impossible Challenges
What has always survived across my years in this work, is my need to rise to impossible challenges – and my drive to turn chaos into order and beauty through the alchemy of metalsmithing.
From my intro Essay for RADIANT ECHOES: THE METAL MASTERY OF VICTORIA LANSFORD (p. 17)
As I have reflected on the works selected for this exhibition, which has asked me to traverse the foundational years in which I became the creative thinker I am today, one thing has become abundantly clear: I see that my life’s work has been a reaction against cultural conformity, and instead, a push towards embracing beauty in what remains a promising, but difficult, time to live and create.
“Ok, so some days “promising” doesn’t feel accurate. As someone once described to me, when deciding whether the proverbial glass is half full or half empty, one can simply say, “The glass has water.”
It’s coming up on two years since I first wrote those words at the top in my monograph’s introduction, and they remain absolutely true. My younger self clung to the idea that life might get easier with age. But like most things for Generations Jones and X, life certainly doesn’t get any easier as I age, and I’m never short of yet more challenges!
I spent the holidays doing only creative work…No admin, no website work, no bookkeeping, no marketing, no social media, no course development, no packaging, no shipping logistics…Only the work that involves why I became an artist in the first place.
In such times as we now live, this can feel super self-indulgent or even trivial, but the world is never a better place when we give up our dreams or stop feeding our souls.
Each act of making becomes a small act of quiet resistance to all the noisy unmaking that’s going on around us.
from “How to stay the course” on The lifeboat by artist and writer Samantha Clark
Doing what we believe in and making the world a more thoughtful, beautiful space is very much an act of rebellion in a world gone mad. We may not be able to make the planet safe in our lifetimes, and so we make as many small, safe places to flourish as we can. If together we make enough small safe spaces, they will certainly add up to a bigger safe space.
