Artmaking, Anxiety + Affinities
Dear Friend,
Anxiety is something that has yet to be differentiated.
If I open the news and read multiple dire stories about global disasters and interpersonal violence, I can’t differentiate them.
I can’t tell what I can do something about, however small, and what is beyond my control. I just feel adrenaline and palpitations.
Instead of thinking about the nebulous mass of horror, I have been trying to separate out the frequencies. I am guided by questions such as: If I took this small step to help would it be meaningful? Where should I put my attention? Do I need to rest?
The more I can differentiate, the more I can take meaningful action.
My usual default is to become overwhelmed, overworked, and to black out. I’m not sure how useful that is to anyone, least of all to me.
A recent conversation with a fellow artist and freelancer about how much time I was spending on my own creative work gave me pause. I fell into anxious freefall.
Then I tried to differentiate my anxiety. Without guidance, pathfinding, and a way to connect to my own practice, I don’t have a starting point to work from.
I spent some time thinking about the processes and pleasures of artmaking to help me reconnect to my own work.
I started by thinking about cake. My friend and I are constantly updating each other about the cakes we have been trying. I loved hearing about the rose and lemon croissant they had discovered on a recent trip into London.
I find reading about baking extremely soothing, especially as it is a mysterious art to me. I encountered the baker Morgan Knight last year through Spacies – a brilliant newsletter on the creative process. I loved everything about this interview on improvisational baking, feeding people as love, and the incredible joy of having a creative career. I also discovered that Morgan Knight created the cakes that Olivia Rodrigo destroyed in her SNL performance
There is just so much joy in both the creation and destruction of these cakes, and when I wonder about the point of artmaking, I come back to the Venusian themes of eroticism, pleasure, and beauty.
Once I can differentiate what it possible to do for others, I can leave space for my own needs, desires, and thirsts.
I love to read about other artists’ processes, and I was captivated, last year, by the work of Michiru Aoyama. He is an ambient musician who makes a new album every single day. His albums are the place he works out his ideas, and they are also made public, almost immediately, for the enjoyment of others. There is so much risk inherent in this way of working, and I was moved by his generosity in sharing his art in this way.
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Once you have been able to differentiate what is yours, what is someone else’s, what you can act on, and what demands rest, you can start to build affinities.
I have always found productivity systems and software quite upsetting. I really tried with Zettelkasten and Obsidian and bullet journalling, but they didn't ever quite click with me.
Conversely, the idea of affinities really appeals to me; clusters of idiosyncratic concepts that complement each other.
I was inspired by the Archive of Affinities to make my own concept archive; things that probably don’t make much sense to anyone else but which feel nourishing to me. My concept archive includes things like blackberries, slime in fashion and art, reality literature, and the colour lilac.
I think the most powerful form of organisational structure and pathfinding for me is the rabbit hole. The rabbit hole is a way to follow what is calling my attention at a given moment, and it is a way to allow my hyper focus to rest on an object without causing me shame. Instead of wishing I could be ‘normal’ and not fall down these rabbit holes, I allow myself to follow them.
It doesn’t always work. Shame, like anxiety, can be overwhelming; a bank of grey cloud that seeps into everything. I still sometimes find myself being critical of time spent following an interest too intensely. I chastise myself for not working or doing something ‘important’.
One way to move through the cloud of shame is to make the rabbit hole concrete. I love, love, love this Rabbit Hole Syllabus created by Alden Burke. Instead of seeing rabbit holes as a distraction from what I should be doing, this syllabus helps me to reframe them as a powerful pathfinding tool.
I decided to make my own syllabus, to help me reconnect to the joy of artmaking, by indulging in the rabbit hole of art about artmaking.
I would love to hear about any of your favourite films and novels about artmaking.
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🍄 Fruit (things that are ready to share)
This week, I want to share some of my affinities with you.
On my website homepage, I have collected together essays, experiments, rituals, and writing guidance for every season.
The writing is guided by the seasons, celestial and earthly, and by plants and their spirits.
I hope you will find something that strengthens your relationship to your own creative projects, and to our more than human allies.
I made this to help me through difficult times when I need to return to the rituals that support my creative practice. I hope you might find this helpful too.
In this podcast episode, I talked to Stephanie Edd about field notes and capturing ideas in an integrated way.
🦠 Spores (tiny ideas)
I watched Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths this week, a portrait of extreme anxiety. It made me realise how much I need this kind of storytelling. Storytelling that treats pain seriously and recognises it as inextricable from humour and horror. A portrait of trauma that radiates outwards and can sometimes look like fury or hardness or despair. The tenderness and depth of emotion portrayed by the actors, especially Marianne Jean-Baptiste, was extraordinary. I can’t stop thinking about it.
𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium (relational networks)
Three dear friends have books out this spring, and I can’t wait for you to read them. If you are hungry for beautiful writing that grapples with the complexities of being a human in our current moment, then these books are for you.
S J Kim’s This Part is Silent, has been longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. It is part-poetry, part-memoir, part-searing critique of academia, and it reads as an act of care for her colleagues and her students, to whom she is deeply committed. The book feels like a handmade tapestry; the working is so fine, and the design so singular. It will be published in the UK by And Other Stories.
SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown.
Naomi Booth’s Raw Content is an extraordinary novel about the terrors, compulsions, and tenderness of early parenthood. It is also a powerful account of the neurological rewiring that can come from familial trauma and the intensity of parental love. A gift for anyone who is, or who has, a parent.
My childhood was a map marked with danger zones . . . Me and my sister were cared for. We were bathed and fed and clothed. But, as with many children, we couldn’t have told you if we were loved. Our experience of care came in the form of a warning’
Helen Jukes’s Mother, Animal is an expansive account of mothering that seeks kinship with the more than human world as a powerful counterpoint to personal and communal isolation during the pandemic. I loved the deeply unexpected connections that the book makes, and I learned so much about our non-human kin.
As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s companions and guides. They allow her to explore where her own animality begins and ends and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.
I wish you a week of artmaking, rabbit holes, and cake.
Love, Laura
🐚 this is microdosing ceremony, a weekly-ish letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
🌺 find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
🐇 explore creative rabbit holes on my website.