OPEN STUDIOS
At the end of the week two we were invited to open our studios to the public at the end of week three. This was not compulsory but an invitation. This is not something that I knew before my arrival, nor did anyone mention it until week two. On reflection, I’m glad that I didn’t know about it before, it might have shaped my work in a negative way, making me face decisions too soon.
At first I was reluctant, as much of my work in the first two weeks was spent outside of the studios—in short I felt I had nothing to put on the walls. However, after an initial panic, I chose to see it as an opportunity to gather my visual material together and see what I could accomplish in a week. In the end that turned out to be a lot more than I expected.
As my work is about creating historically plausible characters who inhabit imaginary lives. The open studios gave me the opportunity to present genuine research documents alongside purely created photographic ‘evidence’. Although, I had a smaller amount of created ‘artefacts/objects’ in which to convince the audience, that didn’t seem to hinder the plausibility of the story. The audience were presented with an introduction that explained that I’d been given an award to research the life of Beatrice Emilia Wilds (the creator of the original photographs: taken in Banff in 1888) and to make my own visual response to her work. It’s a small measure of success that members of the audience were persuading me to contact those local organisations with my ‘artefacts’.
As one of my original aims was to explore how I could do this with a very limited time frame, I feel that I can judge this with a certain amount of success. I think it also reminded me of what can be achieved in such a short space of time, when you focus intensely and without any other distractions.
I also had the time to create a small series of experimental ‘contemporary’ photography/print based works that were a response to Wilds’ historical artefacts. To this I had a really positive response from all audience members including faculty and local non-arts residents. Perhaps the digital print market is different in Canada, but I had a lot of questions about how I made the work.
LAST WEEK
The open studios created a deadline a week ahead of what I originally expected. Bringing some conclusion to the research aspect of Mountain Whispers, I was able to think more clearly of what I wanted to accomplish in my last week.
I asked myself the question, ‘What is the most valuable resource here, for me at this moment?’ For me, that was the control that I had within the digital archival print studio; the immediacy of that resource and how cheap (compared to at home) that resource at Banff is.
It allowed me to play, experiment and explore. It reminded me that several times over the past few years, when doing some other project, I’ve wished to have the opportunity to just just stop and play/experiment, for a couple of days with photoshop. This was that opportunity to do so. Subsequently, this had led to me discovering some new things, but also reminding me of some old things that I used to do. My last week was spent printing a series of the largest digital works, experimenting with different colours and varied effects.
The residency has enabled me to build some new photographic work, but it’s also allowed me, to employ some old skills/aesthetics that I’d forgotten about, namely printmaking. However, the printmaking I’ve now been experimenting with is of the digital variety, and the response that I had at the open studios, has encouraged me to continue exploring this at home.
