Heading home now, finally. Been sitting, waiting on a train I hustled to catch, walked 30 minutes at a quick pace to get here – to hurry up and wait. I love this saying.

Saw Sophie Calle at the Picasso Musée today. What a surprise and delight, and thanks to my friend for making that happen. Five stories of an irreverent take on Picasso by the French artist. A living artist so alive that she was actually there, having taken up an office on the top floor as, as the wall text explained, because there was really nothing left except a few things in her flat, so it was quite empty, quite lonely. The exhibit was immense, and the division by floors provided a lovely sort of encapsulation by theme. I was surprised by the experience, in several ways. I simply hadn’t expected to go, so when it was suggested I thought of course, why not? What is not a day out in Paris without art? I remembered the name of Sophie Calle but not her work. This entire world is several lifetimes away from where I am now, in time, space, and vocation. Art is a part of me I’ve had to put aside, to forget so that I could focus on my lot as a mother, in France, a country that I am only now beginning to know. I’ve put it aside, more like closed it into a cupboard, like the dusty magic cupboard in Narnia. As I was telling P about it today, about my story, briefly, I had fleeting memories of that life before. Again, I find that I am seeing that past with a new perspective, understanding my feelings about just what I experienced then, what it was in me that held me back. It’s a Pandora’s box, of sorts, to stop and think about the past with the eyes I have now. The peeling back of layers of complicated feelings to reveal the hurt and anger and confusion that I felt but didn’t have the words for.

I paid a lot of money to go to art school. I wanted to become an artist. I floundered a bit, tried to paint and didn’t really like it as it was too open, too free. I didn’t know where to begin. Inversely, I loved photography as it gave me the parameters and boundaries that I needed. It was a process art, one that was full of forced decisions. Take a picture, make a choice. Once it is done, it is done. The film will be finished in 36 exposures. Then, you must develop it. How? Exact or longer, shorter time, hotter water – the decision must be made. Choose the frame to print, then the paper, the time, the contrast, the development. Within those choices I found rigidity and freedom. Having never had experienced healthy boundaries, I think I liked this process as it gave me structure. It gave me a structure in which to experiment, and so I did. My very first project was putting writing on female bodies. My body, my friends bodies, my writing. A few words, an abstract poem, a statement in black ink on the flesh of an abstracted form. No one asked me what it meant, no one asked me to talk about it, to elaborate, to reflect. It didn’t seem important. No one seemed to care, so I didn’t either. I don’t think that even us girls that posed for these pictures knew how to talk about them. We didn’t have the words to use or the examples to follow. There were no women in the art department. In the photography department, there were a few but they only talked of light and shadow, of documenting what they saw. I was doing something else, and no one had anything to say about it.

I knew that I was talking about my experiences in my female body, a body that was not my body, as the female body, I had learned, belongs to everyone except its resident. It belongs to the men on the street who catcall it, who tell it to smile. It belongs to the boys at school who are enamoured with its fitness in a tiny cheerleader skirt. The cheerleader itself exists not for her own reward but to encourage boys to win – how is this ok, to teach girls to be decoration whose only meaning is as a prop to hold up the egos of boys and not to exist for herself. I knew that the value I had, the power I held, as a pretty, young woman. It was the only access to power that I had, and I hated it and embraced it at the same time. To be smart wasn’t enough. You could be smart as long as you were ugly as then, you were not a real threat because if you were ugly, you had no power. But pretty and smart? This was not possible because a pretty, smart woman, especially one not afraid to speak her mind or call someone out on their bullshit, well that would present a real threat. But as you are pretty, then you can be knocked down for that, too, and especially by other women. I do recall one woman art history teacher, she did not like me. At that time, there was definitely no rejoicing in the fabulousness of other women as you find today. No, the women, fighting for power themselves, expected you to be plain if you were smart, and dumb if you were pretty. Basically, there was just no way for you to win.

I remember clear as day being laughed at by my art history professor, a man, obviously, when during the one class in which we spoke briefly about feminist art. I said that it seemed clear to me that men hated women because they were afraid of us, because we bled and did not die. We stayed home and tended the kids while they went out and hunted and gathered, we missed a few days to a week each month to our bleeding, and so the balance of power was off. He though this was funny. A man. Thought this was funny. And so the lecture moved on, with feminism and Judy Chicago as a footnote to all the big men of Art History, an unimportant, insignificant footnote. He had presented Chicago’s work as though he didn’t understand it, thought it was an oddity, women’s work. How horribly ironic when the subject matter was literally all of the women artists that were left out of art history. Instead of saying their names, recognising that they existed and were worth noting, he swept them aside like they were nothing. This was how I learned how little women artists mattered.

So here today in Sophie Calle’s exhibition was the account of a response to Guernica, in a book called The Ninth Street Women. They were group of women artists that might have at that time been referred to as painters’ wives. Why, how had I never heard of them before, as a group? How was this not presented along side the grandiose (I guess) ideas of Jackson Pollack and de Kooning and the other boys? Were these women simply cheerleaders? I think not but this is what they wanted us to think, to not know our history, to not know the wise women that came before us. Sophie Calle instead of Guernica installed art works from her own collection, a composite, if you will, of the works of other artists from the last 50 years. A composite was what had been suggested before, and recorded in that book about The Ninth Street Women, so Calle tried it out in her own way, to see if it was as good. I don’t know if it was, because I have never seen Guernica, but I liked it quite a lot, just the same. There was so much more information there, but it is so hard to separate the art from the artist and from history in this hanging, as each work held a place in art history. Perhaps the same can be said for Guernica, too, that it is bigger than itself, holds a compounded interest that has out-valued its inherent artistic worth, because of its place in history and infamy. I wonder if she was thinking about this too, as she put it together. I think that this hanging of work from her personal collection, in the greater context of the exhibition, one in which she deals with her own history, and the inescapability of her own mortality, I think this might be a way for her to reflect on her place in this same grand Art History, as these are not just a grouping of great artworks of great artists but of her own, intimately personal collection. This is her story, her life. She has a personal attachment to all of them.

I know now that to make art, good art, that we have to be in conversation with ourselves to make that art make sense. We have to become aware of what we are doing, even if it is in retrospect of its making. Often, or almost always, I’ve found, you do not know what you are making as you are making it. You only know once it is made. Even then, the why can be quite ambiguous. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, as good art is rarely easily understood but must be encountered, pondered, and encountered over and over again. But the artist must eventually understand so that they can guide the work. The artist must understand through dialogue with themselves. Maybe it’s not too late for me to have this dialogue with my self, to write this personal history, to make sense of the tumble drier of ideas in my head, to put it out all in writing, to prove that I was here, part of this conversation, after all.