"I'm the thing being created"

Artists offer reflections and pointers for getting through fallow periods

All photos courtesy Ileana Doble Hernandez.

Like many artist/parents, Ileana Doble Hernandez’s studio routine hit a block during the pandemic four years ago. She had a five-year-old son, Lucca, at home. She couldn’t go out and take photos and videos for her art practice concerning inequity and gun violence. “Everything was so fragile,” she said. “We knew nothing. I felt depressed.”

What did she do?

“I learned to bake,” she told me over the phone. “I baked so many cakes.”

Every creative person hits walls. Each one has particular routes around the wall. Fallow periods are part of life, but we don’t often talk about them. So I posed a question on social media, and a conversation started. The answers poured in – all thoughtful, all useful. Ileana was one of the scores of commenters.

Some of them were facing down the wall in the moment. “I know I have been here – lost – before and just need to begin,” wrote Sophia Ainslie from a studio on the West Coast of Ireland. But how to do that?