Outlandia Artists’ Residency 2013

Completed Tower #2 this weekend.

Part of research and work developed to document processes and games created to measure the passage of time. Such play is informed from limited materials such as those hand-carried and those within the landscape – rocks, trees, vegetation, paths, e.t.c. The work is framed through seriousness, the mundane, nonsense, failure and success.

I’ve been back in the ‘real’ world for a week scince completing my residnecy at Outlandia. I’ve been reflecting slowly on the next stage for the matieral that I collected and worked on. For me, next will be compliling video edits as ‘video sketchbook’ material from my experiments.

It’s funny but these feel like they are completely contained in themselves as experiments but at the same time, they don’t feel like compeltely resolved works. Hopefully they will lead me to another place, a new and natural progression from these small works to something more concrete.

My audio however does feel resolved as field recordings. The challenge for these is to be able to recognise if they can stand alone as recordings or if they call for an additional mode of representation.

The weather was humid and clear, I could listen and see far. I walked and spider web strands brushed by my cheek.

Some more interventions in a great studio day. Moving forward from the recordings I created on my first day, I took some ‘tools’ with me including string and a pair of tiny scissors.

Process-led works begin to emerge without a strong preconceived outcome – much different from my usual working processes where I hold a fully-formed idea in mind before I begin. This does link with how I make though, as I have a clear image and some sound content I want to capture before I begin recording my footage. I used what objects I had brought to the studio on my first day.

I collected more sound recordings to start to think about developing a short audio release documenting my time at Outlandia through field recordings. I hope to collaborate with artists’ to work on supporting drawings and images for the CD / LP release.

I was hampered greatly by the rain and wet weather today. Unfortunately that is one of the issues when working with digital equipment – if it’s raining you can’t record your material, especially if you are field recording or working out of doors.

I thought best to save my equipment and work in Outlandia the following day as damp electronic equipment would have led to disaster.

Today was contemplative to help decide how best to use the dry day that is forecast for tomorrow.

Welcome to the West of Scotland.