I've decided to start blogging on this website, but I already Twitter as @theflaneuse and have a wordpress blog at http://jwtheflaneuse.wordpress.com/
I believe in the power of the arts to engage, challenge, provoke and change people's lives. My work is about creating opportunities to make this happen.
You will see those lines on my website, as the core of the vision and passion that underpins all the work I do. So I thought I'd start this blog by saying a bit more about why I hold this belief and why its central to my work.
When I talk about art I mean creative expression in all its forms - music, theatre, photography, drawing, painting, film, cabaret, dancing, singing, sculpture, design, creative writing, reading, and so on - making these things, seeing these things, doiong these things, engaging in these things.
I believe that it is this creative expression that makes us human, and is a human right - from cave paintings to posting your own short film on youtube and beyond. It's the search for and expression of meaning.
And I have faith in this.
It's the music I listened to when my heart was broken. It's the experience of making a connection with an audience when I perform. It's the tears in my husband's eyes at a sentimental movie. It's the shared experience of being in a crowd watching a spectacular outdoor perofrmance. It's the time I cried at a theatre production even though it was in a foreign language and I didn't understand a word of it. It's the argument with friends in the bar afterwards. It's the lad who had given up on school completely, but who turned up on time every day to take part in the art project. It's the strange sense of reverence I felt when I stood in front of the Mona Lisa. It's the book I remember better than the holiday I was on when I read it.
A lot of my work is in the realms of the bureacracy that surrounds art - the contructs we have built around it, which are about money, ownership, and the means to make art - about control, measures of quality, and who holds the power.
So if you follow me on Twitter at the moment you'll see me 'retweeting' anything I can about policy and the impact of a likely change of government on 'the arts'.
But what ever happens to the 'infrastructure' the real power still lies in the art itself.
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