I have always thought that I enjoyed the urban edginess of the inner city and the energy that comes with it. My studio is in New Cross Gate, a very different environment to Wimbledon. I had wondered whether I’d find my new working environment rather too sedate but during my first full day at the Centre for Drawing today I actually enjoyed the lack of inner-city noise and the change of scenery. There was something about hearing birds singing, having a window (I’ve never had a studio with a view of the outside world before), and feeling part of a slower and more serene pace of life that I found very positive. After settling down to start work I turned the radio off and moved my desk in front of the window. For the first time in years I felt connected to the world while working, rather than being shut off from it – a feeling I normally admit to enjoying – but perhaps other ways of working can be as productive for me too. This is perhaps something I’ll reflect on further during my time at the Centre for Drawing.
This newly felt connection to reality extended to what I was generating to. My work rarely uses real world references, but instead comes from somewhere less easy to define or quantify. The first thing I did today was to spend time editing and mounting the photographs of the project space that I took on Friday. The images focus strongly on the formal qualities of composition, blocking out extraneous visual information and describing lines, angles and textures. The camera allowed me to ‘see’ the space in a particular way, capturing the physical characteristics of the room in a way that made sense to me visually. This may be something to learn from for future work. For now I’ll make a note to myself to use photography as a way of seeing and recording after the residency.
However, there are still some things that can’t be experienced or ‘seen’ through a camera, like the empty, echoey acoustics and the way the light travels round the project space – these things take time to understand. I watched and recorded how the light entered the room and crept across the wall and floors as the day progressed. I took some rubbings of cracks in the walls to capture the haptic qualities of the disrupted wall surface and made simple, black line drawings of angles and architectural features in the room. One of the things that has emerged today is that I am fascinated by the relationship between the bright white ceiling lights, which are fixed, and the softer natural daylight, which is fluid and moves round the space. This is something I’ll continue to explore visually over the next few days of initial research and idea development. This afternoon I made some drawings of the ceiling lights in ink, masking out the hard-edged, graphic forms of the light casings. All too soon the day was over and I returned home with lots of things to consider before starting work again tomorrow.
