Blocks, barriers and challenges of all sorts can be maddening, isolating parts of any creative process - in the thick of things, it an be easy to forget that they are also shared.
There is enormous value in knowing your challenges are not only your own. In the fog of my own artist’s block, what I most craved were eyewitess testimonies from these foreign lands, these blank spaces with border of vapor.
-from opening essay And/Or
Slender Intuition began when, after relocating in 2020 to Indiana, changing jobs and locations, I found myself completely blocked in my studio. My initial frustrations gave way to curiosity, and I began reaching out to other artists in my new home to ask them about their experiences with artist block, and the ways it impacted their practice.
In 2022, I received a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission to investigate the subject more formally in the form of an essay, which soon became essays. Along the way, I interviewed Eli Craven, Rowland Ricketts, Jacinda Russell, Rachel Leah Cohn, Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Caleb Weintraub, and Marianne Boruch about the moments when block impeded their work, or caused projects to shift in unpexpected directions. As it turns out, in the middle of a collective lockdown, there was much to be said about artist block.
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