A decision to save time and money and travel to the residency by train was made yesterday and so I found myself stressing unnecessarily, like in my old commuter days,about missing my train. Of course there was no need as I had 10 minutes to sit and wait – caught up on some phone calls and emails and then enjoyed my coastal journey to St Leonards whilst making a transportable piece of work which may or may not feature in the end of residency exhibition at the end of the month.
We have already discussed a little the curating of the space and that includes two internal rooms and a huge public gardens. There is undoubtedly room for all of us to show our work but of course I can always find a reason to get distracted with worrying about how it’s all going to work. It fits in to the same category in my brain about where the work will go after if it’s not something that stays in the surroundings – a chalk poem springs to mind that I did on a previous residency, that time train travel and one suitcase for a month really did impact the scale & style of work but that actually meant my work moved in new and different ways which totally enhanced my practice – I can see that now! At the time it was exciting but unsettling that I was going in new directions as this also overlapped with the final year of my degree so I needed some clarity of what my practice was/is.
This rambling is focusing my mind that these constraints – art in a bag – may actually lead me down new paths….excuse that pun – I actually did walk the paths of the park a few days ago and place my work there – away from the Lodge rooms, mantel piece, window sills, it transformed the work – and they (the objects I’d been making each day) started to make more sence.
Someone popped in to the lodge yesterday which lead to a brief chat about what ‘we’ – the artists in residence – were doing. As I started to explain my daily ritual of select,sew, select sew – an hour a day to focus the mind – I had that reality check of not knowing where this ritual was taking me. I was already distracted with the fact that whilst I had anticipated I might improve and make more (in this case longer) work each day as I improved my process, after 5 days I was finding the hour feeling longer each day! The monotony of repeating this particular task was already an issue. The reason for the task was to settle me in each day, give time to think, and get in to the zone of how ladies spent their days in the 1840s, entertaining themselves with stitching and watercolour. Clealy I am too use to rushing around and multitasking and needing more excitement! Also not knowing what I was going to do with these things ultimately has probably not helped. If they are not placed carefully they tangle themselves up in to a total mess – no order out of chaos to be seen! But…..the good news that I woke up early this morning with an idea on what I could do when installing this work…….and now I’m quite excited about going in tomorrow to test this idea out….and to do another hour of select and stitch, select and stitch……
And so yes, I didn’t make it in to the residency space today. I had brought some work back with me luckily, but firstly I felt exhausted after 5 solid days there – all that doing, thinking, talking, making, experimenting was having an effect! But also in walking back to the station yesterday we got distracted by a sign “everything outside £1′ at a haberdashery store. I could not resist the emerald green tangle – I’m currently making some work in emerald green velvet and thread – and this seemed too good to be true…..so today I spent 3 hours unravelling the bundle- order out of chaos – and the whole day went by with no time to travel to the residency….
