Musings ↴

It caught me completely off guard. Ten years folded.

I was back in Tamworth, twenty-three years old, living in the strange space between finishing my Fine Art degree in Nottingham and moving to London. I needed work for a few months, so I took a job in Marks & Spencer.

For months, I folded jeans. That was it. Eight-hour shifts spent unfolding, refolding, straightening piles that had only just been disturbed. Making sure every shelf looked perfect before someone picked up another pair and the whole process began again.

After university, where every piece of work demanded that I look further inside myself, making art had become emotionally exhausting. Years of exhibitions, critiques and constant introspection on relationships, home life, and loss, it had all left my mind noisy.

I didn’t realise how much I needed the opposite. Folding denim was gloriously repetitive. Mind-numbingly boring.

After the fact, I remember listening to Tyler, the Creator’s Boredom, thinking how perfectly it captured that strange feeling of being stuck in a room with your own thoughts for so long that time almost dissolves. My eyeballs were turning to drywall. My room an M&S shop floor. My mind a blank space.

NOTHING was happening. Which, it turns out, was exactly what needed to happen.

Somewhere amongst the repetition, my mind became quiet again.

Without trying, I began noticing things. Connecting ideas. Imagining what came next. I applied for my Fine Art MA in Glasgow. I made new work. The work felt lighter somehow. Less about excavating myself and more about exploring the world around me.

Then London happened. A one-month internship became a career. One month became ten years. I never did go to study my Masters. But I found people and a place to call my new home.

Standing in front of those folded shelves at the Slade, I realised I wasn’t just looking at an artwork. I was looking at a chapter of my own life that I hadn’t stopped to revisit properly.

It’s funny how memory works. We expect the defining moments to announce themselves. Instead, they hide inside ordinary things. A folded pair of jeans. A repetitive task. A season that felt like waiting.

I’m in another one of those seasons now.

The agency I spent the last seven years helping to build has closed. I’m somewhere between endings and beginnings again. Between roles. Between versions of myself. There is more quiet than I’m used to. More solitude. More uncertainty.

Sometimes it feels uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels lonely. But I’ve been here before. Not in circumstance, but in rhythm.

I’ve learned that there are periods in life that look unproductive from the outside. Nothing seems to move. Nothing seems to happen. Yet underneath, something is slowly rearranging itself. Ideas return. Curiosity returns. You begin to hear yourself again. The sparks start to fly.

Perhaps that’s why that installation stayed with me. It was about recognising that some of the most transformative periods of our lives don’t look transformative at all. They look repetitive. Uneventful. Quiet.

Guess it’s time to fold some jeans.