I write about myself a lot, but I shudder deeply at the thought of talking about myself too much and telling too many stories where I am the hero. Nevertheless  I am virtually all I write about right now, because unfortunately for me, I am the only subject on which I am an expert.

For me the challenge is to dig deep to find a way to express something, usually something fairly ordinary, in a way that somehow feels, as equally clichéd and impossible as this may be, in a way that somehow feels new. It can be notepad-throwingly, cry-into-a-buckety horrendous, but the discreet and infinite circumstances that comprise who I am, are new, and I have to believe that there’s something in that. I’m not just an expert on myself, I’m the world leading expert on myself, and the only person in the world, who is permitted access into the secret backroom of the museum of my mind where my thoughts stir and swirl and soil themselves, unmitigated, in protective dim light.

Take the above paragraph and swap out all the ‘I’s for ‘you’s and that’s what I wanted to communicate to the artists in YAK. I hope they heard that and went Yeah Zoe, your mind blows my mind or maybe What a stupid oversimplification, let’s fight.

Either way, I am so proud of all the artists who came to play with us, who were brave enough to indulge deeply in themselves and to give and receive criticism of their private musings, even before those musings had a pulse. I am proud of them for having the courage to share the things they were most uncertain of, because uncertainty resides within the unfamiliar and therein are the pearls of thought that might be as close as we can approach to new, or at least to you.

Zoe