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Today, Facebook told me I needed to post something for Black Cat Comms or the page would be unpublished.
So, I sorta published the page – told people I knew that this is what I was doing. So far, a rather promising and flattering response! Blush.
I have to do this…have Black Cat in the eye, or it doesn’t really exist these days, does it! God I feel old say these days.
My Facebook feed is full of 9/11 stuff. It’s the 16th anniversary.
That means that it’s 16 years since I walked into work (managing a fashion retail store), handed my keys to the 2IC and enrolled in a graphic and web course.
Of course, it didn’t all happen at once, but the events of 9/11 shock me to my core and changed what I wanted to do with myself.
There’s a lot of long stories surrounding my relationship with NYC, and maybe I’ll go into them at some stage, but watching those towers fall, tears streaming down my face, seeing my own NYC dreams fall, made me reconsider some of the things I thought I held most dear to me.
I’d always been into art and making things. Ever since I was a kid and could hold a pencil, I’ve had one of those hard skin bits on my dominant middle finger. It’s still there, but not as hard (thanks keyboard and mouse). I’d studied art history at uni, and was pretty much a dropout so went into fashion. I was 23 or so.
Fashion was fun, but was feeling somewhat shallow – like it was just a cover against anything real. It made me feel shallow. I loved the challenge of turning something not so hot into something hot. But it was really shallow, so surface, regardless how I tried to justify my relationship to it.
I’d played with Photoshop a bit before the towers fell, and made a website. So, when they fell I had to really think about the life I wanted to live if I wasn’t going to live there. Supported by possible the kindest and most supportive I’ve ever met, I threw a portfolio together and applied. And got in. Of course I cried, and felt really validated that someone else could see something in me. I still do. Hahah.
I’m still mates with one of the guys from the course – we met properly over the scanner. He had a pic of him gothed out and his mate wrapped-up in glad wrap. I was standing behind him in the photo. That was a fun night at Bath St!
I kinda caned the course, but ended up going back into retail for a while, picking up all sorts of graphic jobs along the way. Retouching photos for glamour shots was sure fun! No, seriously!!
At 30, 4 years after the towers fell, I went back to uni to finish my art history degree. I got placements and jobs working in culture places, and always managed to wriggle a graphic or web element into them.
Moving to Denmark was where I pretty much focused on design work. When I came back here, it was to a range of design jobs which were fun, but not challenging enough – there were always obstacles to doing the job I really wanted to get out there. So I kinda of floated through jobs. Maybe it was that inconsistent pattern that lead to the last year of being underemployed.
Whatever it was, through some magic or other (I’ll explain that one later too) I’ve ended up here. On the 16th anniversary of the fall of the towers and the broad series of events that have lead me to here, Black Cat Comms is open for business.
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