When working on the design and launch of my website with Rosa last summer I was adamant that I wanted to keep my creative practice and my coaching career separate. Over the Christmas break I’ve had a re-think. So my New Year challenge is to articulate my creative coaching offer alongside my creative practice. Learning to understanding how the two merge, feed and support one another.

I’d been waiting for this Deep Listening training for a long time. Having taken part in a two hour workshop at Arnolfini last October I was totally inspired to learn (and listen) more. I discovered an online course at The Centre for Deep Listening based at Lawrence University in Wisconsin so put my name down for three consecutive Sunday afternoons this November.

When I allow myself to slow down and be open in my practice that’s almost always when synchronicity comes into play. While away on the yoga retreat Jess, our teacher, told us stories of Indian and Greek goddesses, their power and their symbolism. Only a few weeks earlier I’d started work on a new project exploring the power of older women, representations of the crone, the hag, fragmented bodies and the image of the puppet.

Movement Mediation, an explorative session where we would ‘gently move among and with Adébayo Bolaji's artwork 'In Praise of Beauty' exploring the space and connecting to our senses. The session was run by Anastasia Dahl, a Bristol-based performance artist who only moved to the city a short while ago but is already offering much needed spaces for movement as research.

As a studio holder at Spike Island I applied to the studio funds scheme for £250. With so little funding out there this fund is far from insignificant. I was awarded the money to enable me to spend a day with a dramaturg, interrogating and developing my solo performance piece, in my skin. I could have approached a number of excellent people to take up this role but Caroline Williams was top of my list and she said yes.

I had a 121 this afternoon with curator Erin Li. She’s based at the Delfina Foundation in London as a curator working across multidisciplinary arts projects with a focus on performance and participatory works. I had two key questions that I wanted to explore with her:

1.     How to find support for multidisciplinary performance work?

2.     Where the opportunities might be to share this type of work?

I’ve been revisiting the beautiful, evocative photographic works of Hélène Amouzou. I saw her exhibition ‘Voyages’ at Autograph earlier this year and her images strongly resonated with my own.  The work spans 15 years of her life, yet all depicted within the claustrophobic setting of one room. In the introduction to the exhibition it offers that ‘her gestural apparitions are an attempt to recapture her identity and a sense of belonging.’

I’m becoming slightly obsessed with the work and thinking of Xan Dye after listening to them on a Dance Umbrella panel discussion a while back. They’ve developed a series of works under the title ‘Stimming’ including a range of stimming-dancing scores.

We judge ourselves so harshly as artists, and are judged by others in terms of our track record - of exhibitions, sales of work, funding and commissions. The definitions are drawn for us and we impose these on ourselves. Yet surely there’s room to interpret the word ‘artist’ in as many different ways as there are creative responses in the world?