Judith Crispin - Poet and visual artist

Judith Nangala Crispin discusses in bold and simple terms what it takes for her to call herself an artist - the joys and the sacrifices.

Beginning her creative journey as a musician, Judith worked as an opera singer and a composer before arriving at poetry and visual art. One of her current projects is using dead animals (roadkill), and transforming them into ethereal works of art. 

Judith talks about her commitment to and inspiration from the land - the country she lives and works on, and about searching for her indigenous heritage, tracking down as much as she could about her Great, Great Grandmother Charlotte.

Essential listening for anyone who wants to truly commit to living an artistic life.

More information about Judith's work and pictures of her beautiful artwork can be found on her website: https://judithcrispin.com/

Transcript

Are You Still Working?!
Series 2, Episode 4 - Judith Crispin
===

Courtney: [00:00:00] Hello gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working? How to take your creative ideas seriously. I'm Courtney Collins and today I'm talking to Judith Nangala Crispin. Judith is an award winning poet, academic and visual artist of Indigenous and mixed descent living on Yuin country. Judith spends her time making images and poetry that come from [00:00:30] country.

She's published three books. Pillars of the Temple, the Myrrh-Bearers, and the Lumen Seed. Her verse novel, The Dingo's Noctuary, is soon to be published. Judith has won and been shortlisted for too many prizes to mention, but you will hear her brilliance.

Her words and insights are electric. We spoke via Zoom. Judith and Lisa on Yuin country and me on Gambangia country on a wild [00:01:00] weather night that really tested our satellite connection.

Judith, how did you learn to take your creative ideas seriously? You work across so many fields.

Judith: Yeah I mean I've always been a creative. I began in music. So I was writing music before I was writing words. And so it just became a case of moving between art forms to find the art form that felt like it was mine, because I inherited music,
my mother was a musician, so I started with music.

Courtney: What instrument did you [00:01:30] play in the orchestra?

Judith: No, I went through a number of instruments. I started off playing flute and then by the time I got to the conservatorium, I was singing opera.

So I went in as a mezzo soprano and I stayed with that for a long time. but I felt a little bit like being an opera singer was like being in a really top tier covers band in that it was always someone else's music that I was doing. I didn't want to do that. So I hung up my tiara and I went into composition and then I wrote operas [00:02:00] and ballets.

And then over time I just realised that it wasn't really my art form. And made the switch, but there was never, ever a thought in my head that I would do anything else.

Courtney: Hmm. What did you switch to?

Judith: You know it was interesting. I was in Germany on an artist fellowship and I was, maybe 35 or something. And I had to learn German as part of my agreement. And so I used to walk down to the Goethe Institute and nobody wanted to talk to me because my German was so terrible.

And then I met this homeless woman down there on the way, [00:02:30] and she didn't have anyone to talk to, so she was happy to put up with my terrible German. And she told me that she used to have a family, but she'd been made homeless because of her mental illness.

And in this moment of total indiscretion, you know, I said to her, God, there's so many people who are homeless who have never had the kind of security you've had and lost, how do you keep going? And she told me that she would wait until dark when everyone had gone home and she would look in the windows of the art galleries and she would see a painting there [00:03:00] and she would know that painting was made by someone like her, someone who understood her and who saw the world like her and she'd feel connected. And I realised at that point, you know, I was writing all these orchestral works for the concert hall and she would never be able to access them. So the only people I would ever speak to in that art form were the people who didn't need me.

So in that moment, I said, well, that's it, I'm not going to do that anymore. And so I took up photography and poetry then and there and just walked away from [00:03:30] music and never wrote another piece.

Courtney: Wow. Can you describe what skills or knowledge you brought over from music into these new realms?

Judith: Oh, look, everything. People tend to feel like (particularly musicians), they feel siloed in their art form. But if you go and you really learn the craft of any art form, writing or music or dance or whatever it is, that craft you can transpose it to another art form.

Working in photography, you're really dealing with a [00:04:00] 2D art form. So you're looking at space instead of time, which you are with music, but with writing, you have aspects of both of those things, cause you're holding pictures in your head while you're writing, but you have to also govern the way things unfold over time.

So I think, it doesn't really matter what art form you learn. They're two separate things in a way, learning how to become a creator. And then after that, through getting to know yourself, working out what medium your voice is going to be better in. You don't ask yourself a lot of these questions when you [00:04:30] start, particularly when you start learning when you're young.

You just think, Oh, this is a beautiful thing. I want to learn the beautiful thing,

Courtney: So now, when someone asks you what you do and what you're about, what do you say?

Judith: Art tragic.

Courtney: Art tragic?

Judith: No I, I describe myself as a poet and visual artist normally because it's been a very long time since I made music and now that's really primarily the way that I work.

Courtney: I want to go back to what you said about knowing [00:05:00] yourself and being an art tragic, how each project potentially changes you and, perhaps your concept of who you are. Is that true for you?

Judith: Oh, it's absolutely true. And I tend to take on big projects and then those big projects really are watersheds. It's not the same person who finishes that project as the person who started it. The last project that I finished was my book The Dingo's Noctuary, which is an illustrated verse novel. And [00:05:30] in order to find the material for that book, I had to cross the central deserts 37 times on a motorbike with a dog on the back or in a four wheel drive.

I had to collect plant pressings in places that almost nobody has walked for a very long time. And I have about 46 portraits of animals who've passed away in the book, but in order to make them, to find those 46, I had to make about 600. So I spent six years just immersed in the desert [00:06:00] and in death and in this idea of reconnecting with the land, what that could mean, just to essentially do this project.

And every project is like that. You think to yourself, 'Oh, I'm going to do this project'. And that's a door. And then what's beyond that door can be an entire world. And we all tell ourselves these things like, it's going to take me a year. An you have no idea - like you must know this as well as a writer that, the only choice you have is how you begin it.

And then after that, the material dictates [00:06:30] what happens with it after that. And you don't have the huge amount of choice that you believed you did.

You know I felt like I was coming to a cul de sac when I was a musician, because I had the ghosts of a thousand dead intellectual men looking over my shoulder all the time and telling me their very serious thoughts about various abstract things.

And I I found this letter that was written from Anais Nin to Henry Miller.

And this was like this moment where I went, crap, this is where it's been going wrong for me. And in it, she says, women's [00:07:00] creation must be exactly like her creation of children. It must come out of her own blood, englobed by her womb, nourished with her own milk.

It must be a human creation of flesh. It must be different from man's abstraction. And I went, that's it. That is it. To be a woman roots yourself in the body. it's a bodily thing and you have to be comfortable with your corporeality, with your grip on your blood and bones in order to [00:07:30] do it. This is why I started five or six years ago, making all of these afterlife prints of animals that had died, because I realised that, in the cultures, of my great grandmother, Women would have played a very strong role in preparing bodies after death.

And I I used to feel like passing out if I found a dead bird on the road. And so I thought, what would it mean if I sat with these animals, for 50 hours, 60 hours while I made their portraits? Would I be stronger that [00:08:00] way? And then would that open a door for me to be stronger when people I love or care about pass away?

Because none of us are immortal and we have to make decisions. Whether we know we're making them or not about what messages we're going to prioritise, who am I speaking to? And if this is the only thing I'm ever going to say on this earth, what is that thing that I would say? You know, Is it going to be, God, I'm so clever and I've made up a deity?

No, it isn't going to be that. The number of words we are ever going to say on this planet is [00:08:30] finite. There's a number, we don't know what that number is. Maybe I've got 10 more, or maybe I've got a hundred thousand more, so I have to choose them carefully.

Courtney: I feel the power of your words coming through.

We love to talk about grandmothers on this podcast and I would really love to hear more about your grandmother and great, great grandmother and the project Tracking Charlotte.

Well, my grandmother was non Indigenous, she was Scottish, she was a mad Scot, and she used to work for Central [00:09:00] Bureau Intelligence Corps.

Judith: She used to decode katakana machines in the war. So she was super smart and really interesting. And she met my grandfather who was half caste and he was a PE instructor in the Air Force and so they met that way. And after my grandfather passed away, he died relatively early, she packed up her whole family and moved halfway across the country essentially to draw a line under being associated with indigeneity [00:09:30] at that time.

Because you have to remember this was under the stolen generation policies. And if you were up to a quarter Indigenous, which my mum and aunt and uncle were, that they could come and take you away. Luckily for her, my grandfather was relatively light skinned. And so she moved everybody to the other side of Sydney and told us all that we were descended from Scottish people and the Moors had invaded the Scottish coast and all of this kind of stuff.

And there was some Spanish thrown in and [00:10:00] everyone had lost their passports at sea. So no one had any ID papers. And I mean, I know so many people have this same story. It was a long time before I decided to try and find where this was from, then I spent 20 years going from community to community, showing people papers and pictures and just trying to find where we had come from.

And eventually I got a phone call from a guy Uncle Freddy down in Jerilderie, on the New South Wales, Victorian border on the edges of the Murray - Bangerang [00:10:30] country. I had been looking for 20 years and I thought that I was a pretty good researcher. He'd been looking for three months And he's like, Oh yeah, good. Found you. Yeah. We were wondering where you mob had gone.

And so I went down to see him at Jerilderie and he showed me the only photo that exists of Charlotte. Yeah. That was an absolutely revelation to me. Now we are so far removed in some ways, it's very hard to piece these things back. 

We're relying on the white record And that in itself, think is one of the most terrible things about [00:11:00] colonialism, so many indigenous people feel illegitimate because they can't prove their connection or their proof is challengeable or their proof is incomplete. Yeah, I thought about this for a while and I realised that, I spent so long out in the desert with desert people whose legitimacy should never be called into question. And I don't think I know an Aboriginal person who feels totally unassailable in their identity.

Courtney: Before you had made that connection with Uncle Freddie and Charlotte, what was your [00:11:30] relationship, with your indigeneity, being a person with indigenous heritage, but without, I suppose, a tangible link, how did you experience that?

Judith: Well, My grandmother told me when I was little that we had ancestry but as a child it was the thing I wasn't allowed to talk about.

So for everybody else, You know, I appeared one way, but internally I was carrying that all of this time that our family was somehow supposed to be in the shadows. 

But then, my aunt told me, she remembered her dad taking her out into the bush [00:12:00] and showing her how to make boomerangs and trying to pass on some of these things to her. And certainly my mother never hid it either. 

So I think there was an open secret in my family, but there was a feeling, that the generation before my parents had gone to such lengths to try to keep us safe.

And that was always the narrative. Like we have moved halfway across the country to keep you safe, because if people knew your ancestry, they would come and put you in a home. So you have to be quiet about it. [00:12:30] And actually, you know, the poem that I wrote about Charlotte that won the Blake Prize in 2020.

My family went into meltdown about this. And I got summoned to go and sit down with people. And they were saying, people made a lot of sacrifices to keep this family safe and,

And I was saying to them, look, the times have changed and it's perfectly safe to be an Aboriginal person now, and this is all ridiculous.

Within about a month of me saying that, the police broke into the house of Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendumu, which suddenly made me think, what the hell am I doing? And then [00:13:00] not so long after that, the referendum. So you can see why there are families all over this country that, still are very cautious about talking about their indigeneity, particularly if they can pass for non Indigenous.

Courtney: Thinking about safety, in your relationship with art making, do you feel that draws you into unsafe spaces?

I really think it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do if you do it properly, because I think you have to free yourself from the wish to be seen as a [00:13:30] respectable person.

Judith: Because if you want to be a respectable person, then first of all, you need to make a lot more money than you're ever going to make in the arts. The moment you choose to live a creative life, you're already jeopardising your respectability. And then if you let these ideas stray outside of just mimesis, because many people can survive in the arts by saying, I want to be as much like Fred Williams as possible.

Which, you know, I would love that too, or I want to be I don't know, Ray Carver or [00:14:00] whatever. But I don't think that's being in the arts. I think you have to let go of that and say, whatever it is that comes is the work I will create, even if it makes me look like a lunatic. I started writing this book, this was my plan in my very first sketches I say, let's write a book about all the great birds in the desert. This is what I was going to do. Cause I love birds and I was going to go and collect bird calls and write this lovely book about birds. And it ended up being about UFOs and talking snakes. Because. if you don't create what [00:14:30] comes, then whatever you are writing or creating will just be a cadaver anyway.

It will just be a shadow of somebody else's work, or it'll be your apology for the work that you didn't make, that you should have made. When you stray into that territory you risk huge amounts of criticism because you have to be truthful inside of that space. And not everybody's going to accept that truth.

Courtney: How do you engage or even woo mystery in that process?

Judith: Oh that's a very good question. 

[00:15:00] So just the act of wanting to make something already brings you into the mystery. And then after that, I think you just have to listen. I remember I got really stuck one time, you know, you will know this as well, Courtney, but writer's block is just the worst thing that could ever happen to a person.

And I'm up in the middle of the night. I'm going, Oh, I've got no talent. And I wrote to my friend who is a really beautiful, established poet. And I said, I have no talent and I'm just emailing and he was still up. [00:15:30] And he said well, come over in the morning. And I'll see if I can help. So I went over the next day and he drew me a little monster on a piece of paper and he gave it to me and I said, what's that?

And he said, that's the monster of poetry. And I went, what do I do with it? He said well, you go home, you stick it on the wall near where you write. And then write poetry. So I did, and it worked because at that moment, I just needed someone to draw me a monster, to remind me that this activity that we engage in is not about being seen a certain [00:16:00] way or succeeding or being revered or respected or employed or any of those things.

It's about connecting to magic. Connecting back to that force that we all sprung out of and the honor of that. If that isn't enough for people, they shouldn't be artists, the other stuff, it distracts you away from it actually. 

Courtney: I love that so much. I really will be listening to that again and again. So thank you for saying it. I want to understand how you care for your flesh and [00:16:30] bones. the structure that you've built around your practice that supports it, that allows you to keep going in it. 

Judith: Well, It hasn't always been easy. That's for sure. I've got a very understanding partner because it's not only that he doesn't move out despite there having been some times where it's been incredibly challenging for him, because, you know, when we got together, I was a musician and he didn't anticipate, that if a crow exploded, he'd be pulling maggots out of my hair, I've landed in somewhere a bit less [00:17:00] glamorous than the life he thought he was signing up for.

And I have really creative daughters as well. I think it's important to have a nucleus of people around you. Braidwood's an incredibly artistic place. So I've got poets a stone's throw away, and there are a lot of painters and sculptors, and you find those people and they become a wall around you so that when your courage fails, you can borrow some of theirs to keep going.

And it's also about not setting up expectations you can't meet. You know, If I [00:17:30] were living somewhere and I was surrounded by bankers, I'd feel like an extraterrestrial and I would still create, but it would be under this kind of pall of low self esteem or lack of self worth or whatever. So you can't really blossom there, but when you've got other artists and writers around you and they are ringing up and saying, what are you making now? It feels like permission to keep doing it. 

Courtney: can you describe your process of making some of your visual works?

Judith: Yeah. So I come out of a darkroom [00:18:00] tradition where we spend a lot of time working with photochemistry. So, you know, There's paper there, which changes color in the light. So if you shine a light on it, it gets darker. And what that paper is, is a paper which is coated with silver hallowed crystals suspended in gel.

I had this idea because of the Warlpiri painters. there was a lady up there called Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, who's passed now and is no longer Kumanjai, so I can say her name. And she used to decide she was going to paint something and she'd get a canvas and she'd [00:18:30] put it in the backyard.

And she had about 30 dogs. They'd all sleep on it and shit on it. And the birds would walk on it and there'd be mud and then eventually she'd say, okay, that's enough. And she'd take that marked canvas. And she would say, that is the question that country is asking me. Now I'll respond with paint. So the whole creation was not a monologue. It was a dialogue. And I loved that. And I was, in Lajamanu saying, I don't know how to do that in my practice because I'm not a painter. And she thought that I was an idiot and this was [00:19:00] very straightforward. And she said, go into the country until you see a question country's posing and find a way to make your work respond.

So coming back home down into this cold country I walked out one morning and found a dead tiger snake and thought well, that's going to be a question. So I took the dead tiger snake home and put it on the emulsion. And lo and behold, as the tiger snake began to break down, that chemistry marked the page and it actually changed the state of the silver hallowed crystals in there because it worked because animals are full of salt [00:19:30] and salt's a developer.

And there's also all of these other chemicals and things in there that enable the page to be marked. So it was a way of, allowing this animal that has just recently passed to create its own portrait in a sense. that felt more of a conversation than a monologue. So since then it's evolved a bit.

I had to create a big geodesic dome, which you can't see cause it's dark now, but it's up there in the paddock, covered in plexiglass because the wedge tailed eagles would come down and bugger off [00:20:00] with my subjects. And I'd be running across the paddock after them and all my neighbors were laughing at me.

And then I, experimented quite a lot. So I, have elevated perspex boxes, which allow the sunlight to come in from underneath. And I place the emulsion down and then every hour or so I take paint brushes and I paint it through. And after a while I felt like I wasn't getting enough fine detail in there. 

And then I put car batteries down each side, positives on one side, negatives on the other. And then I sprayed the back with a mixture of acids and chlorides and then ran the current. As it [00:20:30] went through, it made these kind of crystal things. 

And then I started experimenting with cliché verre, which is where you get these layers of glass and you can put things on the glass and then it blocks the light.

So it creates white points. So you can put things on it or you can paint them with Vegemite or something like that. I use heaps of Vegemite cause If you paint it directly onto the page, it creates a mark like a developer, but if you put it on glass, it blocks the light and it becomes white.

So there is no part of any of this process that anybody teaches anybody else in art [00:21:00] school. It's all just cobbled together by my complete lack of knowledge. 

Sometimes these prints take 30 to 50 hours. 

And so during this period, I write poems about them, little epitaphs for them. I give them a name, make up details about their lives and this kind of thing. And it feels like by the time the print is made, I feel like I have something to offer them. When I then put them to rest, 

it feels more like a relationship by that point, even though it's obviously a one [00:21:30] way relationship. I've got this show opening next week in Cornwall. We did these two metre by two metre prints of this.

Huge birds and little creatures that have died on our roads. And the reason I love that is that nobody was ever going to notice, a finch dead on the side of the road, This finch was going to go totally unmourned, but because of this practice you know, and I know where this little finch has been laid to rest now, but this finch is a superstar, is a gigantic picture [00:22:00] of this finch in a gallery on the other side of the world.

Courtney: Amazing. How do you avoid drama? How do you avoid the histrionics and the kind of, I guess, The highs and lows of what success can bring?

Judith: I don't have any concern about success at all. I never once thought that success was an option. And this has been a very freeing thing because if success is not something that I need to claw my way toward, then I [00:22:30] am free to make whatever the hell I want, because the stakes are low.

Whereas if I were worried about something as abstract as success, which has got so much luck in it as well. The choices I would make would be different. I wouldn't be trying to make heaps and heaps of art out of roadkill for a start because, this is not a great PR point.

And I would have done my book about birds instead of about UFOs and talking snakes. And it'd be the 10,000th book about birds that came out that year. I think it can just be such a red herring to [00:23:00] worry about success. What success really is, is that you wake up every day and realise you have the space in your life to make things.

That's so much more than other people get, when you think about all those people who are trapped in nine to five jobs, and they can make work on the weekend and they can't get any continuity or any breadth in their practice because they're sort of in that position.

So because we have stepped out of that and lost that sense of having to respond to society in the same way, it comes with huge financial drawbacks and loss [00:23:30] of security and, so on. But it's a miraculous choice because suddenly you have a life, a creative life, and to have a creative life for a creative person, it's like being a goldfish and being shoved into the ocean.

Suddenly you have everything and instead of being confined in this little, you can create on the weekend, listen to the lawnmower next door. Kind of space.

Courtney: Can you describe the ideal conditions for creation for you? What, what does that look and feel like?

Judith: I need to [00:24:00] be on country. It doesn't have to be a particular country. I work very well out in Warlpiri country in the desert. And I work very well here on Yuin country as well. And everything I think comes from that.

Everything comes from responding to the land that I'm on and feeling. That I'm connected to that land even if I'm writing about a different place, if I don't have that, I utterly neurotic, because I'm claustrophobic, I need a horizon. I need to feel like I can go outside and, talk to the trees or the dogs or whatever. 

You [00:24:30] know, We are terrestrial beings. We are like the thoughts arising out of the land.

And then when we hold that connection, the land's thoughts can arise out through us. And I really think that, I am not a conduit for the ideas of culture or for the ideas of society or the ideas of one civilisation or another. I am a conduit for the thinking of the land and that's all I ever want to be, just that. If I can do that well enough, I wouldn't care if another person [00:25:00] bought one of my pictures ever again. You know, If I could really feel that, what was coming through me was what was coming through the trees or what was coming through the dogs or the chickens or, the wedge tails.

Courtney: Incredible. Are there any specific, mentors or other artists that have just really, shed light on where you want to go or how you want to be? 

Judith: I spent a lot of time early on looking at Kiki Smith just the way that she tried to honour her relationships with the land and with people. Not [00:25:30] because I wanted to emulate her, but because she sort of gave me permission to look at those things. There was that sense that I had that serious art would be less representational because of, when I started studying, that was certainly the case. Everyone had to be an abstract expressionist.

If you did something to look like something else, it belonged to the pop art world. certainly in, visual art, she was a very strong influence, and then in writing Louise Glück but also Gwen Harwood. I was really [00:26:00] fortunate to meet. Gwen, when she was old. And I asked her how a person could become a poet.

And she said to me, you have to find the one thing you have in you that you're so ashamed of, you wouldn't even tell your closest friend. You would not tell your partner. if it ever came to light, you would die of embarrassment. Find that thing, write it down and publish it. And then you'll be a poet.

And you know, she did it in her writing. And she was right. Because when you read those poems, you go, you [00:26:30] can't say that. Oh my God, I can't believe she said that. And then you feel it like an electric current, the courage and the honesty coming through to say, there is no part of me that I will keep in the shadows. I will take all these things and bring them out. I will show you all my brokenness and my illegitimacy and my contradictions and you will call me problematic and you will call me full of rage and you'll call me irrational and you'll call me hysterical and I've got a wandering womb and all the rest of it. But I will keep no part of it that [00:27:00] I will not give to art. That was really amazing. I wrote so many poems after that, that never saw the light of day because I was too chicken shit to actually show them to anyone because they really did say things about me that I just didn't want anyone to know.

And then over time, I realised some things only exist in the dark, and when you shine a light on them, you kill your demons.

Courtney: Amazing. I have some work to do in that area I think. Judith, from the way you describe your work and your practice, I just can't [00:27:30] imagine that you would even experience this, but what do you do when the work is not working?

What do you reach for? Perhaps when there isn't a friend on hand to draw you a monster?

Judith: I had a an old poet friend told me it was to do with, writing and when the writing dries up that you need to write eight hours a day.

And I said, you're hysterical. This is an insane thing to say. I'm not going to write eight hours a day. But as I started getting midway through my last book, I started really struggling. So [00:28:00] I decided I would turn up for eight hours a day and I could either, cause I wrote the book on a typewriter. I can either look at the typewriter or I could hit keys on the typewriter.

Didn't matter as long as I was there for eight hours. So for four hours I wrote, prolifically wrote, everything that is not in the book. Everything that I thought was really good writing. And then I would run out of all ideas and stare at the wall for about two hours. And then I would write for two hours the crazy shit that you never write. And it's the only stuff I [00:28:30] kept, it was like, you have to break through to this other ground.

The fertile ground isn't gone. It's just, there's a barrier in the way and you don't know what the barrier is. So you have to keep pushing through until you break through that barrier. And it's the same with pictures as well. 90% of my pictures fail. So if I let that get to me, I'd stop making them.

But you just have to yourself, an artist is a person who makes art. And a writer is a person who writes. So if I'm not making art and I'm not writing, [00:29:00] I am a TV watcher, or I am a, procrastinator. I am a walking around, I'm a doing the dishes person. Like - I am an art creating being. So I have to try to engage with that even when it's really hard because otherwise I lose everything I am.

And all the messages the world will send you. Is that you should do something else, I'm sure you've all had this experience when you go meet people and they say, what do you do? And you go, you're an artist and they go, what do you really do? Does that mean you're on the dole or [00:29:30] whatever, right?

So there's always this pressure from outside. You should be more like us. You should be this or that, but to hold your ground, you have to keep facing up to the blank canvas or to the blank page or whatever it is. That's the price we pay for it, It's transactional. Sometimes something will come and other times it won't, but you have to keep showing up in order to maintain that relationship and to keep the door open so that things can come through.

Because otherwise you go well, yeah, sure. I'm an artist. I haven't made [00:30:00] anything in two years. Keep introducing yourself as an artist and then eventually someone offers you a job in something that's art adjunct, at this funding center or at this university or whatever, and you take that and you still think of yourself as an artist, but you just move away in increments until one day you wake up and you realise it's been 10 years and you haven't made anything.

This is my vision of hell. Just stop that happening. You've got to just keep showing up and accepting that not everything that comes to you is going to be golden. A lot [00:30:30] of it's going to be rubbish, but you don't have to show that rubbish to anyone, right?

You have to give yourself permission to make the crappest art ever because otherwise you shut the door. To the good art that comes, your job is just to discern which of this belongs in the public sphere and which of this belongs in the drawer. And if you can do that, then even bad art that comes is still an expression of your relationship with the creative process.

Courtney: Judith, there is just so much truth and power I feel [00:31:00] coming from your words. I can't wait for people to listen to this. I feel like they're going to be beating their chests. 

Judith: Well, Thanks for inviting me.

Courtney: Are You Still Working is an independently produced podcast by me, Courtney Collins, and producer, Lisa Madden. If there's an artist you'd like us to interview, do let us know through Instagram @areyoustillworkingpodcast.

Till next time.