Artist Alicia Kirwan talks about creative fatigue: "You feel like nothing excites you"
The founder of Beeyarnd, the custom fibre-art company, says: "What’s the point of having something beautiful if it doesn’t mean something to you?"
“I was a food stylist before I started Beeyarnd, my custom fibre- art company. We would shoot for hours, back-to-back, and it would be really mentally and physically draining. They’re exciting projects, but it takes a toll on you. Creative fatigue is very real. The feeling where you sort of blank out and feel like you can’t create anything, that nothing excites you anymore.
Then I realised that we tend to marry our identities to our job — when you talk to people, a lot of it revolves around work: What do you do? What brands do you work with? How much do you earn? It’s as if there’s nothing more to us than that. It’s probably cultural — we don’t really talk to one another so much about our interests, our values. And I just wanted to break out of that.
I never really felt the functionality of my hands, or even my body, before I took up latch hooking — you usually feel that your body is detached from your mind. And when I was younger, maybe there was this desire to push my body, which lead to a kind of disconnect. But when I picked up latch hooking, I realised how important they were, how they were a resource to create wonderful things. A lot of my work is about feeling and intuition — it is very intimate and personal to the clients who commission them. Because what’s the point of having something beautiful if it doesn’t mean something to you?”
Photography Lavender Chang
Styling Gregory Woo