I get asked a lot about artist residencies. How do you apply for them? What do you do when you are there. How do you know what work to make when you don’t have all your materials and tools with you?

These are all valid questions with relatively simple answers. But they aren’t the most important question to ask. You can make art with any materials and any tools, but like writing a story, you need the right ingredients to start.

 Yesterday I went to our local op shop (charity shop) and browsed through the second hand books. I found a book by Michael Morpurgo called Such Stuff: a story-maker’s inspiration. Morpurgo is one of my favourite children’s book authors, especially his story called Why the Whales Came.

This was my favourite story because it showed how the courage and determination of one girl could turn an angry mob set to kill a beached pod of narwhals, into a concerted community effort to save them. Grand inspiration indeed!

So I was well rewarded for my 50c book purchase as Morpurgo revealed the way stories arrived to be told, some almost writing themselves. Part dream and intuition, part research. The rest was logistics.

For me this sums up the creative process itself. Sometimes it is a dream needing to be expressed visually or through words or music or movement. Sometimes it is a tale that needs retelling in a new format for a modern audience. Then you start the research process and it all comes together.

This weekend one of my artworks was in a pop up community exhibition. I looked at where it was placed unobtrusively high up on the wall. No one knew its story or how it came be be created, but it is the expression of one of the key moments in my artist residency on the Isle of Lewis in March and April this year.

This sepia toned artwork was a collage of two prints stitched together. The base image was of Lewisian gneisses, a metamorphic rock with striations found mostly on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. In the centre of this print I tore a hole, a window into the past. Revealed in this window portal was a print of one of the abandoned houses dotted everywhere throughout the Outer Hebridean islands. The prints were created with an argyrotype light sensitive chemical solution applied to paper I had brought with me from home, paper which had survived the flooding of my art studio in 2017 and still had the mud marks on it.

Here were stories urging me to tell. All the ingredients came together when I listened to an old timer tell the story of the Highland and Island clearances of the 1800s where families were forced from their houses to make way for sheep farming.

Dispossession of home and land, by floods and government policies. It was the story of the floods of 2017 and 2022 in my country whose government had for so long denied climate change. It was the story of English government policies enforced on Scotlands Highland and Island inhabitants. The two stories became the inspiration for my image Dispossession, human tragedies resulting from government policies. All I had to do was stitch them together.

So when people ask me about artist residencies and what to create, my answer is the stories will find you. While you may write a project proposal, it is the result of being in a place, with an open mind and listening to the landscape. What it wants to tell you will reveal itself as you start to listen and engage with your creative materials, whatever form they are in. You just need to be there and start the work.