I’m excited to report that I’ll be doing a 6 month residency at METAL Liverpool, from next week.  I’ll be using the time to explore some ideas I’ve been floating around now for quite a while now around connection, loneliness and solitude,  including how  the idea of being alone is mostly now regarded as something to fear.

This concern about loneliness seems high in the media at the moment and how it’s bad for our health, but I think there’s a massive difference between enforced isolation and cases where people have chosen to be alone.  Is solitude itself bad for our health or is it the assumptions made about people who decide to live alone?

Sara Maitland examines this in her book ‘How to be alone. “We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone. We declare that personal freedom and autonomy is both a right and good, but we think anyone who exercises that freedom autonomously is sad, mad or bad.  Or all three at once.” 

Has it always been this way?  If you look back at our recent history, some of the great artists and philosophers were people who actively chose a life of solitude and were admired for it.   In the middle ages, Spinsters were women who were good at spinning which made them successful and financially independent, so when did the term Spinster start to be used as an insult?

It’s early days and I’m not sure where I’m going, however I’m going to start this residency by perhaps recording a few conversions around these topics and see where that leads.  I’ll keep this blog updated as I go to document this process and help shape some of the ideas.