All in artist residency
When you finally face what’s holding you back, it’s liberating. My paint brushes and paints are back on my studio bench, there’s a canvas on my easel and I’m painting. Fifty years of not feeling that I could paint has meant I didn’t even try. But I’ve had years of practising as an artist to get to this point. Now I’m excitement to see what’s next.
What are the most important ideas to include in an artist statement about your artwork? After my artist residency in Oatlands, I wrote how the architectural features in the town and its houses became time portals I used to enter colonial thinking. Peeling back the fragments of layered wallpapers hinted at what my paintings were about and how they responded to this historical town.
Composition can be a tricky skill to master. Sometimes no matter what you do the elements of a piece won’t sit together on the paper. Do you tear it up and start again or persevere until things fall into place? Both actions require courage and both can be a way to resolve the trickiest of challenges.
You need to be bold when you commit to your line drawing. Especially when it is drawn up in ink. I’ve needed to feel bold when committing to adding motifs of lights and lamps to shine a light on the history of Tasmania with its wars and period of martial law. Cracks in the edifices allows the light to shine in and is the first step in truth telling.
What views did the colonists want to create in their newly invaded and possessed land? Most held ideas about what ‘civilisation’ and ‘society’ meant and so forever changed the landscape to conform to this point of view. My preoccupation has been how to find a gentle way into post colonial viewpoints using windows as portals. To mourn what was lost and hold a vision for the future.
There are so many reasons to feel despondent, especially if you are staying in a place which has a violent history. Yet after two days of drawing murky black ink shapes, I knew I had to find a way through to the other side of despair. Enter Dr Bob Brown and his rallying call to action and keeping hope alive.
Stones, nails, lines of history. The past lives on in the buildings in colonial settler towns like Oatlands where I am an artist in residence. I think of the way we had to write out lines for misdemeanours at school. Now I am thinking of the lines responding to this place that I will make and write while I am in residence here.
The annual raft race at Porthleven harbour was a great finish to my time in Cornwall where I could reflect on my last artist residency in the UK. Now my challenge will be to return to Australia to bring this experience into my final project to complete the Masters Arts & Place program.
Creatures of myth and imagination can call to you from the strangest of places. I am attracted to taking pictures of the strangest things, like rusted wire, abandoned buildings and patterns in the asphalt. They inspire me to tell their stories.
The Caledonian Pine or Scots Pine tree seems to symbolise all that is tough and hardy about Scotland. Through it I feel the tug and pull of my DNA, my ancestors voices in the wind, calling. I wrote a poem which became a drawing and then a video. I love the way the artistic process unfolds as you work.
Much of art research is collecting information or data, then conceptualising how this can be creatively expressed. Collecting data about the weather has become a rich source of inspiration in the Western Highlands for over a hundred years. I’m carrying it forward…
Why do people climb mountains? Is it because “they’re there?” In Scotland there is a tradition of ‘bagging a Munro’, climbing one of the mountains over 3,000 feet. My idea of climbing and bagging is a bit different….
It’s so important to document not only your finished work, but also the process of its creation. This means you exhibit your final findings as strong images, yet the process of how you came to make them, your ‘compost’ of ideas and creative process is a valuable part of the work as well and should be valued as such.
You can make art with any materials and any tools, but like writing a story, you need the right ingredients to start. When people ask me about artist residencies and what to create, my answer is the stories will find you. You first need to listen …
Trying something new can extend your world view. From creating a ceramic stone and holding it in my hand, to linking this with US President John F Kennedy’s often quoted line “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
It’s easy to get lost in the big picture, the huge landscape and forget the details, That’s when I find it's necessary to pull focus. Which is what I did by visiting Petra’s stone collection, the inspirational garden of Iceland’s most famous stone collector, naturalist and stone artist.
How do you become unstuckable as an artist? When inspiration dries up, or you’re feeling too tired or stressed to create, what do you do? That’s where a daily practice can save your day and inspire you to keep going.
You can never un-know what you know. In the midst of extraordinary beauty at my artist residency at Cove Park, I discover that just over the peninsular is the UK’s largest nuclear submarine facility. It is almost as if, in the midst of beauty, we need to scar the landscape in the most spectacularly catastrophic way. How to make art to reflect this?
Every time I get nervous or feel under pressure to perform, I remember to let the work develop itself, to find its own story that needs to be told. This is what happened when my photograph of two chimneys became a metaphor for dispossession in a series of artworks devised at my artist residency.
Stone Circles, houses of stone and hills of ancient rock form a narrative of time, place and human interaction with this animate landscape in the Outer Hebrides. They are the beginning of my Stone Stories project.
