A Room of My Own, Online

Collage from the Household Work series

Last year, I joined a life drawing group.

At the end of each class the tutor photographed our drawings, with permission. The next day he uploaded our drawings to his website where he had given each student their own tab. It was thrilling to see my work online, and to see everyone’s work publicly attributed to its author.

Then, in some sleight of the internet, his site and our work vanished.

That experience, of seeing my work in public and then having it disappear, became the catalyst for building my own website.

In thinking about what it means to claim space, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s view that to write, a woman must have a room of her own. My ‘room’ has tended to be the kitchen table. Food is shared, celebrations happen, and life unfolds there. Perhaps that’s why it feels like the right place for making, because of the creativity that arises from everyday family life. It’s a provisional surface, cleared for meals and chats, then reclaimed for making.

Lately, though, the work spread across my table has been on my laptop. I haven’t been arranging images or testing compositions, but in a way I have been. Typefaces, margins, branding, and content have consumed me. Instead of creating art and writing, I have been building an online presence. I’ve pushed my creative and technical limits and created an online space.

I was surprised by the tension I felt. Time spent on admin and design was time that I could have been engaged in creative writing or art making. As if, when I wasn’t making, I wasn’t a real artist or writer. Over time, I came to see that this work — the admin, the design — was part of my practice too.

At the beginning of this journey, I followed an online tutorial designed for artists.

It laid out what the art world expects, which is a professional site that is a little elusive. For a couple of weeks, I admired what I had created. Clean and polished, it seemed like a site that might speak to curators and gallerists, just as the tutorial had promised. But I realised it was too generic. I’d built my house using someone else’s floor plan. Its proportions were correct, the colours neutral. My website would pass inspection, but it didn’t feel like me. I wanted a site I could tend like a garden — something alive, imperfect, but cared for.

I began again.

I resisted the idea that an artist should be a little elusive — unless displaying elusive qualities serves the work. I didn’t want a website that blended into anonymity. I have a complicated relationship with visibility. My instinct has been to step aside once the work is complete, to leave it to fend for itself. In the past, standing with my work has been uncomfortable. Now I am learning that showing up for my work is part of the practice too.

Months of effort have gone into this space. It isn’t perfect or finished, but it is filled with my choices and revisions. Some days I spent more time perfecting an underline hover than making any art. This is the shape of a creative life — one that moves between studio table and computer screen, between making and managing.

There were many times I was ready to abandon my website. Late one afternoon, I lost all my coding. Maybe I’d undone one step too many. My site was lost. At my wits’ end, I even googled designers who rescue DIY websites. But remedial work was expensive, so I had to learn how to fix it.

What I’ve built isn’t just a website. It’s a home for me and my work, where I decide how to greet you, how to engage, what to show.

My website is a home — no longer a compromise or someone else’s floor plan.

Rooms of my own, with space to keep building.