Richard:
Circumstance
The studio has definitely led me to new departures in my work. I moved all my materials in the other day and found myself hoarding them in a corner of the space allocated to me – then a few minutes later I realised I had all this other room to make use of. Almost immediately then my work began to expand.
The other day it rained to hard that the tin roof almost fell in. That’s a circumstance and a half – sitting there making a delicate drawing as you’re deafened by the water hitting hard on the roof. And then came the hail and then the lightening and thunder shortly after.
I have now arrived at a comfortable working process I think. That of building semi-installations, which in turn use drawings to imagine and fabricate influences of space, form and shape – environs really.
The abandoned house is an environ I think. It is also a retreat for the distilling of an idea:
“I begin to think of retreat, rooms for retreat, other sides of an earth for retreat, pages in books for retreat, Derbyshire downs for retreat, unfathomable mountainous lands for elevated retreat, the mind as retreat, the home its bounds and well practiced ritual of pseudo-housewifery as secret retreat. Secret retreat: lack of function without reason habitual avoidance as retreat. Retreat is also wholeheartedly fictional: these landscapes we explore and the names we learn to then navigate them, become something of film sets built on location. In these film sets we ramble, climb, swing, swim and jump from rock to rock – in them we find our ideas discordant with anything fabulous. Instead they are as still as the deer and her family of calves, naked beneath the pylon across the field, as you hide among the grass like a actor acting to hunt.”
