Joolz Denby, Guest Speaker at the BAR Conference
Expressing her thanks for the invitation to address the delegates, Joolz explained that she viewed all her “fields of endeavour just as being an artist and the different ways I express my creativity.” She emphasised the significant and increasing contribution of creative industries to the national economy, before recalling her own education, which included more than one spell as a Bradford College student. She disclosed that she had started a Dip HE thirty five years earlier but that she never completed any HE course that she enrolled on, distracted by gang membership and an early marriage.
“I am the pupil from hell; the worst in your class, who is not listening. I would be doodling in my rough book or gazing into space. I felt my education had nothing to do with real life. I went to a very strange school in Harrogate where I was taught how to get out of a limousine, how to write a cheque and we went on a school trip shopping in Paris!
When I was eleven, an English teacher took some rough books away that had poetry in and sent them to Ted Hughes. He wrote to me critiquing my work. I was annoying, strange and had my head packed with ideas but that teacher did not condemn me for my difference. She understood my daydreaming was functioning not dossing about. It was part of my becoming an artist.
My mother worked full-time and father worked away on oil rigs so my nana brought me up. She had two phrases: ‘The devil makes work for idle hands’ and ‘Don’t!’, employed if she saw me sitting thinking quietly to myself, doing nothing or dozing.
What is seen as wasting time is a most necessary part of any creative thinking. Times of quiet daydreaming where the mind lies fallow allow creative thoughts to come through the mush of daily existence. If you stare into the dark peat water of a tarn on the moors, you will see the pale fish. These are like the creative thoughts which need to have time to come to surface.
If you fill up the mind of a young person with stimulating things they will never develop an internal life, which is the only thing that will sustain them. We are robbing our children of the chance to develop an internal life by constantly over-stimulating them. Parents put kids in front of TV as a babysitter and even libraries are places to stare at computers or talk. In my day very strict librarians forced you to be quiet. Allowing kids to have computers and TVs in bedrooms is a terrible crime. Children need space. Your bedroom should be where you can read a book, draw or just daydream.”
Joolz then discussed a recent TV programme she had seen where children were bullied for being different. She criticised the teachers who told the bullies ‘We know he is irritating’ about their victim, while instructing him to behave more like the others. “Schools are full of artistic kids who are different. We can’t allow them to be bullied. We should celebrate their difference. I was bullied and look at me. I am a living work of art! We need to distinguish between kids being inattentive on purpose and those actually thinking.”
Joolz told how she attended a conference where everyone was asked what would make their life better. “When I suggested a maid I was told off and called a Bolshevik. I was thrilled! They expected me to suggest a computer or some other technological piece of kit. I have to do all the housework so I want a maid to let me daydream! I can’t do this when I am working. If I am tattooing and I make an error I mess up someone’s life. But for a novel I need time to mull over characters. A maid would be invaluable because artists need time not toys. This is especially so when they are young and constantly told, ‘do this … do that.’
Children need quiet, safe places two think. They need an internal life. TV is one of the most destructive forces in our culture today. We can’t un-invent technology but have to create a balance. I know it is hard bringing up kids. The mothers of this world are not honoured in the way they should be. They are educators at home.
We need to find a way to save a whole generation otherwise, when these children are adults, they will have no attention span and be unable to forge relationships. We cannot wait. I see people who have an internal life and they are really living. I worked within the music industry for thirty years. Many professional musicians don’t listen to music at home but regrettably most have been robbed of silence by tinnitus.
Everyone is constantly subjected to noise, for instance, by mobile phones, which have eroded the space between personal and public life. We need these spaces. There are generations of people not knowing how to think because they have never been encouraged to do so. I have worked extensively in prisons and with marginalised young people, who are all saddled with ideas that they are gangsters. They feel they have to live up to this stereotype as there is no alternative and they tell me that even if they want to do something different, the media won’t let them.
Creativity is a very broad church. My old father in law was a master carpenter who could make the most beautiful things. I told him he was an artist. We sometimes restrict the meaning of creativity but we have got to find out what it is to do a thing properly and well. That is the craft of an artisan. I am wearing earrings made by an artisan carver and jeweller, depicting goddesses who sleep and dream the world. We owe it to our children to allow and encourage them to dream their world in peace."
Joolz had promised an “interaction and event, not a talk” and she certainly lived up to this, as delegates enjoyed a very spirited debate with her to round off the evening.