Sara Baume

“I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.”

“How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.”

“People don't like it when you say real things.”

“It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.”

“You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.”

“So it's as if,' I say, 'I'm okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren't living up to other people's version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once.”

“I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.”

“In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected beauty.”

“But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.”

“See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.”

“There really isn't much wrong with me,' I say, 'it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?”

“And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.”

“No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they're already there, and I followed them, unwittingly.”

“Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?”

“Art, and sadness, which last forever.”

“How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.”

“There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art—so much that I'd try and make it for myself.”

“. . . buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I'd be home again. I didn't even know exactly who I was with or when I'd be home again or where home really was anymore.”

“I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.”

“After college, I started working in the gallery and found myself surrounded by a whole new set of people who had not yet grown accustomed to my antisocial tendencies, who had not yet learned to expect me to say no, and stopped asking. I was invited to go drinking and dancing again, and so, I tried.”