Working in our individual studios we meet three times in the day. Here are our individual reflections and thoughts from the day’s actions and events.
Louisa Chambers:
Stop, start, stop, start. Working pattern for today. Have not found any sort of momentum as constant life interruptions are – well – interrupting. Buzz, whirl, burr, beep. Sounds from my mobile, car, head.
STOPPPP!
BUT tomorrow is a new day and going to try (if physically and mentally able to) stay all day in the studio – until the final reflections at the EOD.
The Studio. A space to reflect, a refuge for my head and a place to make. Thankful that I have this s/place ATM.
“You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon and it turns into a piece of bread.”
Quote by Philip Guston (taken from ‘Night Studio memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer’ which I’ve started to read again after a 16-year gap).
Edy Fung:
Never expected the residency will land in the period where new beginnings start but old projects refuse to make an end! I was looking forward to entering a heterotopia with Swallow but disruptions adhered to the day – I guess this is the reality and the challenge for artists to find this luxury of having a headspace. Residencies are a great tool to frame a spacetime experience; for me, the chaos and turbulence were magnified in my mental space as well as through the Zoom camera! I couldn’t be more grateful though that my vulnerability was caught by extremely warm, intellectual, attentive, and supportive artists.
It has been so interesting to hear how everyone navigated their ways to their artistic and professional practice today. I’m thinking mostly about what it is that one learns from art academia? How do art schools teach (that can’t be absorbed by other pathways)? Where is art education heading in the next 5 years? At the moment I’m at the crossroad of many aspects of my life, reflecting on the sustainability of the career and how to “function as an economic unit” (borrowing Edwin’s words) in whichever mode of being suitable for the artist.
(Vlek Plek, pastel on paper, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, 2021)
Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen:
This online residency is kick-starting our investigation into graffiti, language, translation, and public space. It is the initial stage of a project with fellow resident Stefanos Pavlakis. The outcome, a visual and textual statement, will inform our developing collaboration. When international travel resumes, we will collectively explore the political graffiti in abundance on Athens’ city surfaces. Hosted by Zoetrope (Athens) in 2022, from a public studio for artistic research and exchange, we will curate public events and produce printed matter that will be introduced into the fabric of the city.
Danica Maier:
Day one starts with a ‘clean-up’, a revamp, a revisit to something just (about) finished to help start with the new. I consider how copying and appropriation are so much a part of my practice – that so often there is a starting point to build on or from – even if this is myself.
Trying to start writing and drawing and stringing together a series of others words, my voice. The start is always tricky, foundation work is needed – laying the groundwork to start from, to build on. Terms, keywords and thoughts have been captured, defined and their etymology explored. A structure is beginning to (perhaps) emerge.
Repetition and pattern. Repetition and attention. Repetition and variation. Repetition and labour.
Variant reiterations and unrepeating repeat.
Un- / Re-
Michelle McKeown:
I’m working towards a two person show with fellow artist and friend Alan McMahon scheduled to open in QSS Belfast this summer. Our working title is ‘Becoming Undone’.
I begin the day with the good intention that I will devise a new colour palette; that I’ll observe McMahon’s glitched photographs more closely; that I’ll amend those painted studies that have been waiting for my attention on the studio floor for the last week. Then, the inevitable occurs, I stumble on a small note I scribbled a month or two before – a sketchy sort of observation of a mathematical model of the torus. The torus becomes the torc – the torc becomes La Tène and before I know it, between the leafy tendrils and scrolls of my La Tène drawing, there emerges a familiar pattern I remember – diffraction. I drift but I invariably always seem to come back around again, close to somewhere that I thought I left behind. Discussions with the group make me think about this spiralling back and accept this nachträiglichkeit as part of the process, nonetheless I wish it was different, more strategic, more to plan. The colour palette remains undeveloped, the studies unworked, the plan undone.
Stefanos Pavlakis:
This online residency is kick-starting our investigation into graffiti, language, translation, and public space. It is the initial stage of a project with fellow resident artists Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen. The outcome, a visual and textual statement, will inform our developing collaboration. When international travel resumes, we will collectively explore the political graffiti in abundance on Athens’ city surfaces. Hosted by Zoetrope (Athens) in 2022, from a public studio for artistic research and exchange, we will curate public events and produce printed matter that will be introduced into the fabric of the city.
