Guest post: The fast and the slow of it – Hester Ullyart on time, creativity, motherhood, and gestating new work

We occasionally invite guest posts from artists who are grappling with big questions about craft and practice, at points of personal and creative transition. Here, ahead of the release of her debut album The All Clear, Lyttelton-based multidisciplinary artist and poet Hester Ullyart thinks through the relationships between time, creativity and motherhood. This is ‘tick tock’ of a different kind: when it comes to creativity and artistic output, do the experiences that shaped us have a sell-by-date?

I never thought I wanted to be a mother. Well, no. That’s not it. I was just, for a long time, neutral to the prospect. On the fence. Any flashes of ‘broodiness’ were strongly reserved for significant longings to own a dog, or in a fleeting surge, rooted in desire and closeness to a partner at the time, which is no doubt nature’s trick.

Some people dream of building a family from a young age, I dreamt of building a career. Making ‘art’ has always been the thing. Having a project. As long as I had a project, I was content. Quietly, afraid that somewhere along the line, in becoming a mother, I might resent a child for taking away my precious time, and well, that wouldn’t do, would it. Three words of peril and warning flash in the woman artist’s brain. Sylvia. Head. Oven.

I remember watching the acclaimed poet Salena Godden at a poetry night in the UK a couple of years ago, reading her poem “Book Mother” from the collection With Love,Grief and Fury:

“I don’t remember ever wanting to make babies nearly as much as I wanted to make books.”

I understood it. I still do.

So writing this, at 7 months pregnant, is… interesting. The baby kicks as I type, which makes the keyboard jolt from time to time. It’s the most peculiar, natural thing. Reader, I changed my mind, somewhere along the way, be it through biology, love, fate, or all three. I am lucky enough to have had this change of heart granted, something I wasn’t even sure I could achieve. I feel a new version of grounded. Turns out, motherhood is just another chapter of creativity that was on the list all along. People have been kind. They say it ‘suits me’. I guess it does.

Admittedly, what is making me feel more awkward, more ‘testy’, is that I have an album coming out, and am in the dogged period of pushing it into the world. One that has taken me a fair few years to gestate. Why? What has been the resistance here? Well, let’s see.

Number One, the most obvious reason: Money. That’s a no brainer. It all looks so easy from the outside. But I probably don’t need to explain that making an album, recording, distribution, PR, the actual physical copies, videos, endless else, is a very expensive, and at times, tiresome game these days, if you’re counting the amount of hours of social media that’s expected if you want to do it ‘properly’.

Number Two. Imposter Syndrome, or, Perfectionism. Ah, old friend. You never hesitate to show your face, close to the close. And you will be the death of us all, if we let you win. So we ignore you. In bursts.

In On Connection, Kae Tempest writes that “The difference between an artist and someone who dreams of being an artist is finished work.” Reading this a few years ago on a solo work trip, stung. While I agreed reluctantly with the sentence, I didn’t want to see my own failures in the truth of that. I knew that I was hiding under a bushel, that with a little more force, a little more “feel the fear and do it anyway”, I could get this thing out of the gate. It’s just music. It’s just another project. Still, I let the months trip by, let a theatre project come in, taught classes, got distracted, got busy.

Reason Number Three, the more positive version, for when I am being kind to myself, is Artistic Endeavour, aka, Standards. This can easily be swapped in for Perfectionism on a bad day. But without patience, and true love of the craft, without loving the journey, and taking time to develop it, I wouldn’t have all the memories, the various offshoots the making of this album has brought with it in its jagged approach.

I’m proud of the band who eventually recorded this album with me. I love how it’s turned out, and I can track how I gradually built the confidence to invite in experts I admire, such as William McGillivray of Goodwill to mix it, the journey we’ve all gone on together, how it really is a living, breathing, sound work, recorded live, in the heart of Lyttelton harbour, in the candlelight, in our drummer, Joe McCallum’s living room overlooking the water. I can remember each small win, each step of bravery. Music is different from acting. With acting, I am a channel, I am a conduit. WIth music, unless you take on an alter-ego, there is a bareness, a vulnerability.

But there’s a fourth, more pernicious, more truthful reason, nagging at the helm. Summed up easily enough when chatting about the potential set design for the gig with Chris Reddington last night on the internet:

Chris: what are you clearing?

Hester: heartbreak mainly at the time – I wrote it a fair while ago

The album is full of words I wrote, mainly, in the duration and aftermath of Covid. So, 2020, 21, 22. Now doesn’t that seem like a very long time ago, people? A period when the whole world was covered in a cloying uncertainty, desperate, paranoid. Some people in the area loved it, I know. “All those beautiful sunsets!” Many of us were very lucky in this part of the world to have been protected from the great swathes of horror elsewhere, and mostly not be cooped up in small, high-rise apartments like friends of mine back in the UK and in Europe. But it just so happened that Covid coincided with a lot of my own personal turmoil. Heartbreak, crisis of confidence, the loneliness and guilt of moving countries, all of the fun stuff. I remember thinking at the time that my own self-crisis was aptly absorbed into this new world. I made the film I am all the rooms of the house around then. People assumed it was about isolation, about lockdown. It was, but frankly, not of that kind. I was dealing with rejection, and a lot of un-dealt-with sadness that I had to attend to. I had to build up a bit of self-love.

“I still love you somewhere and I guess that’s ok.” I wrote those words, which turned into ‘People Do Stupid Things’ on the album, after bumping into an ex in the street. My heart would hammer and I would turn into myself like an octopus shrinking back into its hole in the rock. But this poem wasn’t just about him. It was about my first love, too, who’d rocked and rolled life all through my twenties, in all volcanic tumult, crisis. Healing takes all shapes and forms. Memories shape us, wounds shape us, especially if they are left to fester. They are the wave that repeats, rolling over the same land, until eventually, the whole landscape is altered.

And still, there is a lagging sense of shame. Why has it taken you so long to drop this album off at the gate? Aren’t these sentiments  yesterday’s news? If this were your child, they’d be talking by now. In the case of the root memory of Fast Romance, they’d be hot-wiring a car and sticking two fingers up down the highway, so long, loser! Isn’t it a little sad, to be bringing out material whose roots lie in the waters of being 15, 19, 22, 32?

In conclusion, dear reader, no. I have come to the conclusion that time is irrelevant when it comes to the marks certain periods of our life and experience make on us, and the art that might respond to that. Some of us find it hard to get proper ‘closure’. It doesn’t mean that we’re crying into our breakfast cereal every morning. It does mean that sometimes, it takes us a little longer to prize our fingers away from our precious little private mournings. A fair few of us have a private garden full of the aches of the past. We visit them, we tend to them, and quietly they heal, they bloom, they turn into flowers.

“I know this too shall pass.”

In writing The All Clear, I shot an arrow. I sent a dart out to the future, in the hope I would ‘get there’. I didn’t think it would be four to five years of combining hyper focus with periods of shelf-putting. I didn’t know it would take a solo demo album (1 year), a live show or three, performing it for Tiny Fest on the stairs at Tūranga with a wonderful group of All Clear ‘Angels’, and the kick up the butt (thank you) of actually getting a yes to an arts council grant to pay the performers and record the live album (3 years). I didn’t know I would then pour in thousands more to get the thing finalized and off and out into the world proper (makes it 4ish, 5?). I didn’t know that when the date finally came to release the album to the world, it would alight on Friday the 13^th, officially the most frightening day of the year, but also of the fertility Goddess Freya, Venus, a day which celebrates beauty, intuition, fertility, love. I didn’t know these things, but perhaps my intuition did, somewhere along the way.

It is my hope that on the 13^th, The All Clear will become just that, a doorway, a realm, for me, for other people, to accept their worries, their fears. To connect to whatever binds they know are holding them, and find the strength to let go of, maybe, one piece. Whether this album is ‘successful’ in terms of streams, internet listenership, radioplay, in terms of audience numbers, in terms of getting that nod from the music industry, is yet to be seen. I’m kind of past caring. (Kind of.) There is success, because it is complete. I have completed it. I have birthed it into this world, and from there reader, it’s none of my business, because it exists, and will have its own life. I can hold it in my hands, I can play it, and sink in. Hopefully, so will others. That is the trick of a work that stands the test of time. It captures a feeling so immemorial, that it never goes out of date. And you can’t rush that.

I knew when I found out that I was pregnant, that it was time to let this album go. It has been long enough. With it, goes the ‘me’ of before. Now or never. I can’t be singing songs about people I loved then, I will want to sing songs about the present, about the now.

So be it, I’ll be 32 weeks pregnant on the 13th. It’s now or never. Tick-tock. Better get this album out.

When my child is born, I will of course turn my eyes there. They are already turning. The understanding, the lens in which I am looking through, is different. But not diminished. I will be a different person. I will be a mother. I can still be an artist. It’s another layer, and the work that has come before, the precious carbon underneath. There are pros and cons to all of it.

Chris: what are you clearing?

Hester: heartbreak mainly at the time- I wrote it a fair while ago

Chris: Ok, green light to awesomeness…

Let’s see hey. But I like the sound of green lights.

Hester Ullyart’s debut album, The All Clear, is a ten song collection of song and spoken word narratives. It comes into the world this week with a special live release show at Lyttelton Arts Factory, 8pm, Friday 13 November, with a live band of local legends (Reuben Derrick, Joseph McCallum and Hannah Everingham) and support from Instant Fantasy. Tickets are available here. Learn more about Hester’s work here.