What Europe Taught me about my Own Creative Voice
I want to tell you something I notice whilst travelling through Europe, its taken me a while to find the right words for it!
Not because its complicated, but because it touched something I didn't quite know was there.
In the Netherlands, and Scandinavia especially, art was simply everywhere. Not tucked behind gallery walls, or reserved for certain people, in certain places, it was just there, sculptures standing in fields, installations beside rivers, murals on the sides of ordinary buildings, carvings along roadsides that most people drive past daily without a second glance because they had just become a part of the landscape.
I recall standing by a huge sculpture by the ocean and feeling that subtle shift in my body, in my chest, it wasn't awe exactly, but something quieter that said:
" Oh, so this is allowed, this is OK, this is acceptable as art, as a self expression "
There was an openness to it that I hadn't expected, an unspoken message woven into the fabric of those places saying
" Your creative voice matters here, your way of seeing is valid, your expression belongs in the world, not hidden away, not apologised for, not made smaller so that others feel more comfortable"
It was a kind of expansion felt in my body, the way you exhale when you have been holding your breath for so long, you had forgotten you were doing it.
Permission I didn't know I had been waiting quietly for my whole creative life.
Then I came home and I notice something I had not been able to see clearly before, it was a kind of suppression, not loud or aggressive nothing as obvious as someone saying your work doesn't belong here, it was just quiet, subtle, almost polite.
The sense that having a strong visible unapologetic creative voice might be... a little too much, that your work might be wrong somehow, too unusual, too visible. As if creativity were something to be done privately
Kept contained
Brough tout only when it met a certain standard that nobody could quite define but everyone seemed to feel hovering somewhere above them.
I wondered how many photographers had made themselves quieter because of that feeling.
How many had kept their work in folders on their desktop, never shared, because somewhere along the way they had absorbed the message that it might not be good enough that they might not be good enough.
That their way of seeing was perhaps too particular, too strange, too weird, too unlike what was expected to be worth showing anyone!
And I find that genuinely sad, because creativity is not a performance to be judged and ranked and found acceptable or wanting.
It is, at the most honest, simply a human being paying attention to the world and finding a way to say
"I was here, I noticed this, this is how it looked to me"
What I think this does to us...
When we absorb, even subtly, the message that our creative voice might be wrong, we start to look outward for permission to express what is inside us
We scroll to see what we are supposed to make
We follow trends that were never ours
We make technically competent photographs that look like everyone elses, and wonder why they feel hollow
We stop sounding like ourselves, and we call it being realistic, or being humbles, or not wanting to get above ourselves.
But it isn't any of those things
Its creative suppression, and its exhausting
It makes us smaller than we actually are
So, to you, if you have ever made yourself smaller because you aren't sure your creative voice is worth hearing...it is
You way of seeing the thing that feels most personal, most strange, most unlike anyone elses, that is not the thing to hide...
That is the thing to follow
Not because it will win competitions, or gain followers on social media, or be universally understood, but because its yours, completely
And the world needs more of that, not less.
So, what you think you should be doing...turn down that noise, and turn up the quiet voice that already knows, your work belongs in the world
Don't let anyone make you think otherwise, not even yourself...
Mel
