I feel it is important to state our initial intentions for the residency at the start of this blog and record how each project changes throughout the progress of the residency.
Nina works in response to place and people as a curious observer of everyday life amid the flux of the city. She often works outside in abandoned urban spaces as a countermeasure to city life and the containment of the studio.
In Chongqing, Nina will locate places described to her by other artists who have also taken part in the 501 residency. To do this she will have to negotiate the fast pace of change in Chongqing and the fragmentary nature of the descriptions. Along the way Nina will find places to make work and claim them as her temporary studio.
My practice involves a series of sculptural gestures, which respond to the psychology of the studio. For Chongqing, I have devised Objects for a Studio, a project where I spend a single day creating work in other artists’ studios, using only the objects I encounter there. By placing myself in the highly personal domain of another artist, for a very short time, I hope to provoke the extremes of emotion that the studio creates, and stimulate the production of new work. I will document each studio day with a single photograph.
Mine and Nina’s practice is ephemeral; based on experience and situation. We propose to approach the Chongqing residency as individual artists, but to bear witness to each others work, and seek to convey this to an audience.
We arrived in China on Tuesday 9th November and spent a few days in Beijing visiting galleries and tourist attractions. We flew to Chongqing 3 days later. Our blog starts on our first full day in Chongqing, Saturday 13th November. We have decided to meet at the end of each day of our residency, over a cup of tea, to discuss the events of the day. We will then alternately document the key aspects of this discussion on this blog. As we cannot always access the a-n website in China, we will upload posts retrospectively and include the date on which they were written.
Jessica Longmore
13 November 2010
Chongqing
