Little and Often

Why action matters more than inspiration

Little and Often

I feel like I am becoming a reiterator of Jimmy Carr. He wrote something recently about inspiration that stuck with me.

“I never refuse the muse. Every time I think of a joke, I write it down. I try new material every single night I perform. Little and often.”

Then the line that really stayed with me, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us go to work.”

That line has been sitting with me. It made me realise how much time we spend waiting for inspiration to show up, when most of the time it only appears because we have already started. The amount of ideas I have had in the car or in the shower after doing something is ridiculous. Not before. After. It is almost never the beginning, it is a response.

I think back to Transience. That series came from a full year of trying things. Most of them did not work. Some of them were honestly bad. But I kept going.

I bought a piece of white card and played with light in a spare bedroom of a share house. Opening and closing blinds, moving objects around, watching how light hit them. Trying to photograph something I did not fully understand yet. I tried everything. A lot of it was not for me, but that was the point.

Over that year I probably made over 100 photographs. None of them feel like where I am now, but they were necessary. I do not think you find your voice without trying on a few others first. There is something strangely beautiful about making work that feels right in the moment, only to realise later that it did not land the way you thought it would. Because that is how you learn.

Instead of trying to find what you love, you can start by finding what you do not. Do that enough times and eventually something sticks. For me, that process led me to other artists. Oliver Mayhall and Rodney Smith, that kind of tongue in cheek surrealism. And then Hiroshi Sugimoto.

His work still stops me every time I see it. The way he plays with time, with stillness, with something close to death but not quite. That stayed with me. It pushed me further into the work I find myself returning to now.

And that is where I am. Not at the start, not at the end, just somewhere in the middle. Trying to define what this path is and how to communicate it to someone seeing the work for the first time.

I have just wrapped a pop up show of Transience. I nearly did not do it. Part of me did not want to exhibit the work, part of me thought I would regret spending money on printing and framing. I did not.

Because I realised something while watching people interact with the work. It is really simple. Action leads to action. That is it. Take action in any direction and keep going until you land somewhere meaningful, somewhere that aligns, then go again.

I spent almost a year looking for inspiration for a new series and not much came. But shooting did. Shooting led to more shooting, and failing, and then doing more. That led to Transience, over 15,000 photos to get around 30 finals. This show only had 12.

But something happened. I had three works in a show and from that I got a call asking if I could do a pop up two weeks later. I called the framer and somehow he made it work. Ten days after dropping off prints, I installed the show.

The foot traffic was underwhelming at times but because actions leads to action. People came and took photos, shared to socials and then I got messages,
I sold three framed prints to people who saw the work and liked it from a social media post.

Now will the world change with this little micro bits of excitement? Probably not.
But 10 or 20 of those little micro moments of momentum can change my entire life.
I don’t know about all of you but isn’t worth exploring even just to see what is possible as a result of it?

So I will keep going.

Little and often.

Some snippets from the show