Creative Hibernation
A project that uses as completely different medium can help with artist block and burnout. Image: Crochet blanket in progress.
“Creative Hibernation” = a period of not creating.
Sometimes these periods last a week or more and sometimes they are extended into months. These rest periods are an important stage of the creative process and something all artists should schedule into their yearly creative plans. Your hibernation will help you to rest and reset from your practice and limit your burnout, allow room for new ideas and potential projects to come to mind. As you start to push into a more full-time artistic practice you’ll find just how important this period is for you to be able to continue creating - just like working any full-time job you get holidays, during that time you don’t work or even think about work (why should your art practice not be the same!)
Depending on how you work as an artist - installation artist, freelancer, content creator, printmaker, painter, videographer, writer… your work will determine how you “hibernate”.
For me, I tend to work towards a body of work. Once the collection is complete and any deadlines for smaller projects I’ve picked up along the way have been met, the release of said work and celebrations that accompany them and then - Hibernation! During this period I neither create or consume any art.
After about a month there’s this slow build up back towards the studio as my hands start to itch for my art tools and the call to create grows strong. Usually I start out with something far from my normal practice - I crochet blankets! This keeps my hands busy creating and gives my mind a chance to wonder. I'll then start to snoop around on the socials and have a look at what everyones been up to and get myself up to date with what’s going on and what’s coming up.
By now I’ve had ideas growing in my mind and I'll go back through my notes about future project ideas (I have a list saved on my phone notes app) this will lead me to some journal sketching. Then begins the research into my new topic, general research and artist research - something that took a while to learn the importance of at university - more drawings and more accumulation of notes/ideas/research and slowly picking through my work and deciding what’s working and what’s not, creating prints and layering different pieces, seeing what works and what doesn’t. new ideas are sparked along the way and these are taken note of and added to my “future project ideas” notes.
A project can go for any length of time depending if you have a deadline or not, the nature of the project and the outcome you are aiming for. Many of mine so far have been about 4-6 weeks depending on the school semester as I’ve been working towards my degree and also having school age children, working on a project is much easier when they are all at school. Considering a university semester consists of 2-3 units which means 2-3 projects on the go at once, this can be a heavy work load if your ambitious and still experimenting with mediums. but this can also benefit your art practice, working between different projects helps to keep them all fresh and spark more ideas (also can help with drying times for some mediums - you can work on something else while you wait)
Once you have completed your project (projects) it’s important to go through a hibernation period again - even if its only a week, you’ll feel so much more enthusiastic about moving onto your next project. Obviously you need to take into account your income, but if you push yourself too hard for too long the burn out can cost you more (potentially your creative career!)
Always, Audrey x