I’ve given up on ever seeing the amazing sunlight from my first day at the Centre for Drawing again, so have compromised somewhere between soldiering on regardless and thinking on my feet. My previous ideas of making work that changes once the sunlight moves across it will remain as ideas until I am lucky enough to be working in a space with natural light again. In the meantime I have today been filtering things out of my sketchbook to develop further in the last two working days of my residency.
After my experiences at CfD I’ve been wondering what it would be like to do a longer residency. As well as being able to generate more work I’m sure I’d be completely exhausted too – I’ve had a fantastically intense time at CfD. In an ideal world I’d have liked these first two weeks to do research, generate ideas and test out initial principles, with a further two weeks to create something more resolved. But as it is I’ll be leaving with plenty of things to keep working on and a big burst of energy from my recent sustained activity.
Today I’ve been reworking a couple of things from last week’s sketchbook research. I’ve remade some line drawings in black acrylic on paper and photocopied them. Not entirely sure what I’ll do with the photocopies as they copied much cleaner than I’d expected, without any of the anticipated stripey rendering or grungey toner marks. I’ve left them spread out in the research studio for reevaluation in the morning. Despite the drawings being very reductive, literally just three or four lines, it took most of the morning to ensure that I made a neat job of them. In my sketchbook I can tolerate errant blobs of paint and leaking masking tape, but not once I’ve committed to prospect of people actually seeing them.
I also returned to the folded metallic structures I started exploring last week. I made a series of folded lines in metallic card (these are just ‘sketches’ and with the benefit of time and access to the appropriate technologies they would be realised using less ephemeral materials), and experimented with the reflective qualities of the card by adding sections of different coloured paper or card. The original forms had evolved from line drawings I’d made from the architectural features of the room last week, and from trying to suggest corners and receding perspective in a three-dimensional ‘drawing’. Today, once I’d placed the structures to the wall I noticed that the white gridded window frames reflected in the shiny surfaces, introducing aspects from the room back into the piece of work. I suppose this is obvious but it’s easy to get so involved in making objects that the way in which they interact with the environment can come as a surprise.
Before I left I made a plan for tomorrow, my last working day of the residency. I can’t believe it’s nearly over…
