All in Artist Residencies
This week I listened to my inner voice, booked a ticket to London Heathrow, caught a train to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and bought a motorhome. Some people thought I was mad to do such a wild thing, but there were others who encouraged me to keep going, so I did.
How do you choose your own adventure? Combine art and travel and that’s the grand adventure to me. Which is what I’m planning for 2023. This is the big reveal. I’m off to Devon, England to undertake my Masters at Dartington Arts School.
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 …
I’ve lost count of the number of synchronicities that have happened in my life. When you say yes to opportunities and chance meetings with people, sometimes the best experiences present themselves.
I have been lucky to research and create art about a specific place on artist residencies. But it wasn’t always like that. In many cases it has taken years before my art about place could be be expressed as a placemaking ‘retrospective’.
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.
