They say that the power of self-belief allows people to achieve extraordinary things.
Athletes are famous for it, as are politicians. But what about artists?
When it comes to the world’s greatest artworks, what role has self-belief played in those creative processes?
Were Christo and Jeanne-Claude filled with resolute confidence when they set-out to wrap a 2.4-kilometre stretch of Sydney’s Little Bay coastline in woven fibre in 1968?
Did Picasso possess an unwavering vision as he painted Guernica in 1937? (If, according to the story, he finished that floor-to-ceiling masterpiece after just one month of frenzied activity, the answer to this question is surely ‘yes’, he was certain he could create that great work.)
On the other hand, how many artists admit to feelings of unending self-doubt? Artists who live with a constant fear their grand visions will ultimately prove impossible?
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In search of answers to these questions about how self-belief and self-doubt fuel creative processes, ArtsHub speaks to four artists who make difficult, risky and/or experimental work for their thoughts.
An outdoor aerial show on a life-size ship: what could possibly go wrong?
For theatre-maker and director Patrick Nolan, currently Artistic Director and CEO of Opera Queensland, there is one particularly ‘risky’ project that stands out in his decades-long career as being layered with elements of both self-belief and self-doubt.
As Nolan tells ArtsHub, while working as Artistic Director of Legs On The Wall in the early 2010s, the company was invited to collaborate with UK dance company Motionhouse to make a co-created work to open the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad in Birmingham.
The director recalls the project as built around the Olympiad’s vision of people coming together from all corners of the globe, and would therefore be “a story about a boat full of people migrating from a distant land with nothing but the contents of their suitcases and their dreams”.
Titled The Voyage, the production required a 60-metre long passenger liner ship to be built in the centre of Birmingham, which would be the set and stage for a 20-piece brass band, 40-person choir, 140 community performer participants and a cast of 24 professional performers to present a live performance work over a four-night season.
The work relied on both companies’ specialist knowledge of aerial work in live performance and required the 24 trained performers to undertake high-level acrobatic work, such as tight-wire walking, flying on cranes in harnesses and performing choreography across every surface of the giant replica ship.
But despite the project’s solid and well-resourced development period, as the production approached its final stages, a huge unexpected spanner was thrown into the works.
As Nolan explains, “Very late in the process, when we thought we had all the designs approved and budgets signed off, the UK Government cut a swathe through the national arts budget.
“It was a terrible time, as many small to medium companies disappeared overnight,” he continues.
“Those cuts had a major impact on the design. However, the work’s designer, Simon Dorman, did a brilliant job of rethinking the concept to enable the scale and complexity we had imagined. We then spent the final few weeks picking up wrenches and paintbrushes and anything else necessary to finish building the set.”
As it turned out, this unexpected funding cut, and its stressful ‘all hands on deck’ consequences for the team, resulted in higher levels of audience engagement in the show, as Birmingham locals saw the cast and crew literally putting it all together before their eyes in the centre of town.
“Excitement grew around what was happening, and the locals started to take ownership of the production,” Nolan recalls.
So, what role did doubt and uncertainty (versus self-belief and surety) play in this process, and how much did it contribute to the final successful outcome?
On this question, Nolan offers a philosophical response.
“I think a sense of danger that tests the limits and an uncertainty that fuels the imagination is always required [by artists] to think about an idea in a 360 degrees way,” he says.
“Sure, you need a map and a sense of what you want to present to an audience. But often the most rewarding artistic process arises out of a map that is torn up and sewn back together in a different pattern to reveal ideas and approaches that were not apparent at the outset.”
But does the director ever question this ‘tear up the script’ method when working on high stakes creative projects?
“I actually think risk and doubt are important elements in any creative process,” Nolan says.
“And one of the gifts of getting older is becoming familiar with many forces that feed into self-doubt,” he adds.
“While I think doubt is a vital part of the creative process, some doubt[s are] better than others.
“When it is sabotaging and stifling the creative flow, it is useless. When it is challenging me to think more deeply about my ideas and the way they might be realised, it is a good friend.”
‘If we failed, we failed’: a work with no room to move
For visual art duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, who routinely undertake ambitious, large-scale projects that involve objects like planes, construction equipment and other very big things, they still remember their 2003 work The Cordial Home Project as one of the toughest and most urgent they’ve ever made.
As Healy tells ArtsHub, “The project involved the demolition of an entire real-life home from the suburbs of Sydney and our reconfiguring it [as a sculptural object] in Artspace’s [inner Sydney CBD gallery].
“The work was born from the white-hot despair we felt in regard to securing a place to live,” she continues.
“The end product was a lasagne-like block of house that had no space between the stacked materiality of the block.”
With only a month to create the final work in the gallery, the duo describe the process as “do or die”.
“We project-managed this ourselves and we got the help of our family and friends to achieve this work,” Cordeiro says.
“But we had no idea if we could actually pull it off. We had no yardstick to measure off, because while we had worked on large-scale works before, this work was an order of magnitude greater.
“But we just did it. The work was created on pure grit with no room for experimentation. If we failed, we failed.”
So, 20 years on from the The Cordial Home Project, what qualities do the artists rate as the most important to keep their artistic practice in motion over the long term?
“Once you begin on the path of action, you must keep going forward,” Healy says.
“It’s a bit like in the Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling competition [held annually in the UK],” she adds.
“In the Cooper’s Hill competition participants fling themselves down a 180-metre hill, chasing a round of cheese.
“I think art-making is much like that competition. Once you’re engaged, you just have to keep going or you’re going to go head over turkey. This is the trick with art. You have to have just the right mix of delusion, sensitivity and common sense to pull it off.”
That said, Healy also expresses frustration towards arts sector bureaucracies where creative risk-taking has become a buzzword rather than a living reality for artists.
“People expect artists to take risks. This is what makes art exciting. So, we need to stop arts money going into paying tradies to create edifices, and start giving arts money to actual artists to make the art,” she says.
“We need to be creating an environment where taking risks can actually be met with reward.”
Working with loaded subject matter
Finally, for multidisciplinary artist Alex Seton – who is well-known for his use of marble stone to reveal unspoken undercurrents of contemporary life – his most recent experience of artistic risk is centred on imagery that is often unseen and unrepresented in art.
“The work is based on the image of an erect penis,” Seton tells ArtsHub.
“I know that image is such a potent and loaded symbol – no puns intended,” he adds, “let alone as sculpture”.
But the impetus for the work, like a lot of Seton’s projects, came about through his observations of history.
In this case, it was after he noticed a distinct absence of erect penises in ancient Greek sculptures of the male body while studying at the American Academy in Rome a few years ago.
And while the artist felt sure he wanted to investigate this strong idea through a new sculptural work, he also had concerns about how the subject matter may be perceived by others.
“Early on some sort of residual Christian shame must have bubbled to the surface and I found myself starting to doubt my idea as being puerile or not worthy,” Seton admits.
“But once I discovered this very particular block of Italian statuary marble that had sat in the rainforest in Queensland for 25 years, I knew that I absolutely had to try a contemporary environmental riff on the ancient Greek ‘Herm’ sculptures.”
Read: Yes, creative procrastination is different
So, in this case the artist’s doubts were eased by his discovery of the ‘right’ material to allow his idea to take shape.
“It was only when I came across this body-sized block of pure white marble with its extraordinary marked and scuffed skin did the work resolve itself and I resolutely knew it was going succeed and that I must make it,” he explains.
But how often does self-doubt creep in to Seton’s investigative creative work more broadly?
“I think self-doubt is part of the process,” he tells ArtsHub. “Often it’s when you’re nervous or feeling out on a limb that the most exciting results can be achieved,” he adds.
“Ultimately, I think art is a doing word. So, if you’re hesitant – just do. Find out.
“Not doing it at all is far, far worse – because then it’s just a wisp of an idea taken away by the wind to become the regret of a creator who forgot to create,” he concludes.
