The work in progress: celebrating the creative process
‘Art […] suggests something beyond itself. We cannot be finished with it.’ This note underneath one of Festing’s poems captures her attitude towards the creative process — it is something constantly ongoing and of great creative value. It is not finished products with which Festing is concerned, but the process of creation itself.
White Queen’s Last Stand explores the life and art of French sculptor, Germaine Richier. Throughout the pamphlet Festing explores Richier’s creative process. In ‘Check But Not Mate’, Festing details how Richier created her sculpture Chessboard (Grande):
Grappling with cancer,
what could she do
but burn like driftwood
brilliantly.
Brooding on her chessmen—
Rook, Knight, Fool, King, Queen,
She built life-size simulacrums
gave them gesture.
Underneath the poem is a note detailing Festing’s own creative process: ‘On another visit to the Tate, I stood in front of Chessboard (Grande) with a plain sheet of paper fixed to a plastic folder. Moving around the sculptures, I made pencil sketches of them.’ Indeed, Festing uses notes and diary extracts under many of the poems here. Underneath ‘L’Atelier D’Antoine Bourdelle’, for example, Festing notes: ‘Form is secreted by process, like our bodies. Form is secreted by experience, says improvisational musician Stephen Nachmanovitch.’
This is poetry as biography, and the footnotes mean it’s also a work of autobiography, with Festing detailing her thinking and how she went about writing her poems. In ‘L’Atelier’, Festing describes Richier’s workshop as ‘her belly, her womb, / where young are conceived and grown.’
In a note under ‘The Couple’, Festing references John Cage who ‘said that he was not interested in art as self-expression but as self-alteration’. By making visible both Richier’s creative process and her own, Festing reveals the creative process as an act of self-creation and self-assertion. This is a fascinating pamphlet, which offers a glimpse into the creative life-force of not just Germaine Richier but also Sally Festing herself.