Like everyone else, I am frequently embarrassed by my life. It seems more like maintenance and getting by than living. What’s the point? Why bother? Apart from intoxication, the only place that offers respite is participation in the making and performance of art. Magnificently meaningless, force and energy here eclipse the monotonous, unending, melancholy search for justifications for why to carry on. But insidious thoughts still find their way to whisper from the shadows of my shame. They offer joyless counsel: don’t take the risk of embarrassing yourself by fooling around with art.

It’s a paradox. When I am in art’s happening, I’m indifferent to the thug rhetoric of philistine pragmatism. It scuttles away like the cowardly thing it is. In art’s magic circle, I’m confident, unself-conscious, life-affirmingly foolhardy regarding whether my life is at risk or not. But once I step beyond art’s perimeter, this person withers away. As if art were but a blush. A shameful blossoming of something that then easily fades without trace from the face of my life. As if it had never existed. How can I hold fidelity to something that can’t be bothered to stick around? How can I get back into it when I can no longer see the entrance? How can I get home to this simultaneously flagrant yet fragile form of habitation within my being?

Through low-grade magic. Trickery and decoys. By distracting the part of me that lacks the guts for art, so that the “art being” within me can have the space once more to stretch its limbs and dance. Through the sorcery of creative restrictions. Through productive masochism. By frustrating the pride taken in the ability to choose so that something can expand beyond the realms of the autonomy of choice. By bottoming. Because as every queen knows, it takes a bottom to make a top. Through introducing a radical passivity into the control-freakism of my despair.

In desperation I therefore set myself a task. Every night after I’d got into bed, I had to make an image. It had to be completed that night before I went to sleep. This requirement was non-negotiable. I had to work in the uncomfortable but ultimately liberating tension between my narcissistic desire to create something aesthetically satisfying that I could show off to others and my self-annihilating desire to exit consciousness and the social realm and descend into the withdrawal of sleep. I was only to use the things I had available in a pot of old pens and bits and bobs on my bedside table. There were to be 63 images, because on the wall opposite my bed was a grid montage of 63 photographs. It had been made by my friend Jacky, who was sick with cancer. Every day, for 63 days, she took a picture of her dishrack. If I retained fidelity to the formal pattern of her grid and practice, maybe she wouldn’t die. She’s still alive. And so am I.