The project actually started last year at the end of November with an initial meeting and a long walk, followed by a workshop in December. All of us get a mini-residency opportunity in the Forest Studio of 24-hours – or 48 hours if we share with one other artist. I’ll be sharing the studio with Ben Hunt and we’ll be there next week.
It is a great way to start the year and the prospect of making new work is helping lift the gloom that descended on me at the end of last year – a gloom tied up with the current political landscape and my exasperatingly painful knees.
In the proposal I submitted for this project I said that the project would be:
An extension of recent work on the theme of Gardens – defined broadly to include public parks and other bounded constructed natural spaces – as sites of invisible labour.
and that it
would enable me to further develop ideas around the nature of work in spaces, usually perceived of as places of rest, healing, recuperation, peace by linking the physical effort of creating artworks with the labour that goes into these constructed landscapes.
I am expecting my ideas to change and my recent video sketch is less about labour and more a response to the notion of movement outwards (nature) and inwards (human) as set out in the project concept: https://vimeo.com/249118694
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