It’s been a few days since I came back from Svalbard and I had a chance to gather some thoughts. As my first residency (yes, I haven’t mentioned that, have I?) and such an intense one at that, this experience has been transformative for my practice and I am immensely grateful to a-n for supporting it.
I have been inspired, saddened, thrilled, uplifted, entranced, sobered, confused, awed, thwarted and encouraged.
As a result, I am re-thinking my entire approach to the development of my practice and the ways of incorporating theory, research, and activism into it. I now see much more clearly what it is that I want my practice to be, but also what I don’t want it to be. The initial interest in marks, traces, and the human need for „leaving a mark”, re-surfaced several times after I’ve abandoned the project, although in different forms. Following up on the many threads, which share common denominators, I will now devote some time to research aimed at choosing the „hooks” that will develop interests into projects.
I will definitely be coming back to Svalbard, and this time to do a project, hopefully early next year.
If you find what I wrote here resonating and would like to see if we share interests, you’d like to collaborate, or would like to go to Svalbard and want advice – get in touch, I’ll be happy to talk.
Greetings from Roja, Latvia, where I will be spending the next two weeks at Roja Art Lab.
photos are a mix of Foxfonna and Nordenskiöld glaciers.
