There’s been a bit of a gap between this and my last post, in part because I’ve been moving around a bit (re. where I’m living/staying). When I tell someone I’m currently an artist-in-residence they tend to imagine that I’m resident in terms of living on site; of course my “residence” is actually purely work related. So far in my career I’ve been an a.i.r five times in five very different locations, including a forest and two private schools; only once did the position involve/include living accommodation and that was through a rather tenuous connection! This occasion is similar, The Muse Gallery doesn’t have on site accommodation for its a.i.r’s. Instead the opportunity proffers studio and exhibition space in the heart of London. But this arrangement does add to the slightly disparate feeling of the end result in this case for me.
We a.i.r’s are four in number, working part/full-time simultaneously to pay London rents, else living further away in my case (outside London); making the opportunity to access the studio daily actually untenable. It would be nice to be benefiting from the feeling of working alongside each other but rarely are we in the gallery together. I, for one, am trying to get around geography (that is, because my home is a 6 hour round journey from Portobello road, in Sussex) by house-sitting in London, as and when the work is available. I get a lot of work done wherever I’m temporarily calling home but then I must move on. In my last post I spoke of the advantages of preserving an aspect of ones productive time without being observed, so spending time working off site has its advantages but I am torn, because a residence that actually came with a residence would be novelty.
