Personal – Alexandra Ross

Cultivating a daily practice is possibly the most challenging thing I am trying to accomplish with my art. The only thing I do daily is have a cup of coffee. I don’t even sleep everyday.

I am tackling a giant multipiece linocut. With over 150 individual pieces and measuring 42″ in diameter, the only way completing this by July is possible is with a daily practice. Everyday I sit down and carve 1 to 3 pieces, and little by little I make it through the work.

I have set out an impossible task for myself. I might as well go find gold fleece.

I have tried really hard to keep my work in frontline crisis and trauma training separate from my art practice. I dislike it when I am at work and people find out I am an artist and jump to the conclusion that I am or want to be an art therapist. I also don’t want the goal of my art practice to become my personal therapy. I want a clean lines between art, work and my personal life. This time, I want nice clean orderly boxes.

But these days my trauma informed training is seeping pretty heavily into my art practice. Working so closely with my personal narrative I am applying all the skills and tools I know from my frontline training on myself as I piece together my past. My intention of cultivating a daily mindfulness practice coincides with my attempts to cultivate a daily lino carving.

In the mentorship program Brenna walked us through goal setting and “habit stacking” as a way to achieving goals. I drink a cup of coffee everyday when I wake up. I stack a mindfulness practice to that. I stack a linocut practice to my mindfulness practice.

In this way, my daily linocut is stacked together with my coffee and my mindfulness. This has an unintended effect of placing my art practice into this nebulous realm of the personal and therapeutic.

Exactly where I didn’t want to it to be.

But exactly where it has to be.

Good thing I am practicing nonjudgement observation. I am mindful of the tension.

Transformation is a bitch.

My Roots: Arrival / 120 film / 30 second exposure

On January 1st I turn 36. It is a significant year for me as it is my “equalizing” year–it is the year that means I have lived away from “home” as long as I had lived at “home.”

I left my family at 18, bought a one way ticket to Scotland, and went to the Highlands to become a nun. As a back-up plan I bought camping equipment and thought I would live off that until I figured out my next move.

I did not make a good nun. I didn’t even make a good hiker. I crash landed in Manitoba in 2004 and stumbled though my 20s.

Another important thing that happens in my 36th year is that it becomes the year where my rate of moving average drops. Currently I sit at 35 moves, but come January first, I will average less than one move a year.

I’m getting all rooty.

Something I have noticed about living in a space for a relatively long time, like, over a year, is that you can unpack. There is time to organize your space. And something I noticed a few months ago after unpacking the last box, is that my brain feels more organized. Almost like moving is disruptive to your external life and your internal life.

I think it is these thoughts and realizations that have culminated in my decision to devote the next year of my art to exploring my personal narrative. I have a lot of shit to cover.

I thought I could make my work about cool things like chaos theory, or environmental extinction and the emergence of new ways of adapting…but no. My personal narrative keeps coming up and I think that if I don’t get to it, then it will eventually overwhelm my work and come out anyway.

Time to dive.

2021 is a big year for me.

I will hold my breath and plunge in head first.