Swallows: A Virtual Residency

Working in our individual studios we meet three times in the day. Here are our individual reflections and thoughts from the day’s actions and events.

Louisa Chambers:

The collaborative walks this morning between Berlin, Lincolnshire, Glasgow, Nottingham, Belfast and Stockholm – helped me to really focus in the studio today. I had no life interruptions – perhaps being a Saturday. Today was a good day.

Started to work on another small painting which intentionally acts as a pair with the other one that I have (I think) finished. Enjoying layering up the colour segments again slightly changing tones. The coloured shapes are interacting with one another either clashing or harmonising.

Trying not to adjust and rework the other painting. I need to leave it to be.

This three-day period has reenergised me, a time of connections and meeting of a new group of people albeit virtually. Likewise, the residency has allowed me to have some time alone, reflect and make – and I am thankful for this.

Edy Fung:

Thinking about languages, (disrupting) repetition, looping, pattern recognition in the visual, sonic, and verbal. Is this ability to move horizontally and map connections across abstract ideas and anecdotes simultaneously still unique to human beings? It must be! It is something at the moment cannot be replaced by an A.I., who is still only very good at performing one specialist thing very well at a time. I hope to uncover more artistic values belonging to a human being that can remain in the future.

Powder Tips, pastel on fingers, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, 2021

Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen:
On this final day of the residency we have fine-tuned our way of working together.

Crucial decisions have been made about the thing that we are working on. We now have two weeks to finish it. Today has been spent on bringing drawing and photography together through digital collage: revealing visual poetry through designed pairings.

The ability to produce the thing requires a high level of trust and generosity, and the appreciation of the other.

The thing, in the form of printed matter, will be gifted to our fellow residents in advance of our final virtual residency session, on 8th May 2021.

Danica Maier:

Great to start the day with a group walk. Walking together (during various types of lockdowns) in Glasgow, Belfast, Stockholm, Nottingham, Berlin and Waddington – lovely interconnections were made, birds from far off locations were heard and traffic from other cities/countries startled me as I walked down my empty village street. Being together when separate while outside in the cold sunshine.

This final day felt a good conclusion as thoughts and ideas come together to be more of a starting point – I end the residency feeling like I can now ‘begin’.  Most of the morning was spent reading my writing, thinking about it and tweaking it around. Then after an interesting and meandering lunchtime discussion that touched on – language, understanding/ comprehension, how we ‘think’ and see, layering, sound and music, and so on – I spend the afternoon working on drawings.

This was great to focus on various iterations of fragments and layered drawings. Revisiting and reworking, relaying and overlaying, gaps and mismatches, small and smaller, pink and red, blue and blue.

Michelle McKeown: 

I wake up to another luminous azure sky in Belfast and get ready for our ‘grounding’ walk. I make my way towards the greenway in east Belfast. A virtual dérive is not something I’ve ever taken part in before and I feel excited about the prospect of what is to follow. Sure enough the sensation is not so much grounding as one of compelling atomisation as I  catch glimpses Berlin; Glasgow; Stockholm; Nottingham and rural England, all simultaneously.  I return to the studio.  There I initiate another kind of grounding and take up a brush to begin the dark ground of a painting. It’s an old study that’s been niggling me for a couple of weeks.  I finish it somewhat decisively.  After lunch, I ponder the discussion I had with The Museum of Loss and Renewal and Stefanos Pavlakis and I feel grateful for their insight. I think about the current disjunction between my writing and practice, how awkward I feel when trying to express my relationship to practice right now.  The suggestion that the unfinished or overbaked quality in my paintings might have significance intrigues me.  It’s not something I’d ever considered before. The very possibility makes me smile and laugh at my own resistance, my stubborn refusal to open up to what is staring me in the face, what the work might be trying to tell me.  My refusal to acknowledge this aspect of the work,  I realise, has been a limiting assumption.  I  recognise the necessity to re-evaluate my understanding of what it means to finish a painting or an art work.  Can it be said that a work is ever really completely resolved or  ‘finished’,  so to speak, or is it the case that it is infinitely open-ended? Like the spiral?

Stefanos Pavlakis:

On this final day of the residency we have fine-tuned our way of working together.  Crucial decisions have been made about the thing that we are working on. We now have two weeks to finish it. Today has been spent on bringing drawing and photography together through digital collage: revealing visual poetry through designed pairings. The ability to produce the thing requires a high level of trust and generosity, and the appreciation of the other. The thing, in the form of printed matter, will be gifted to our fellow residents in advance of our final virtual residency session, on 8th May 2021.

Working in our individual studios we meet three times in the day. Here are our individual reflections and thoughts from the day’s actions and events.

Louisa Chambers:

I think I’ve finished a painting today. I’ve decided to leave it up on my studio wall and to just keep looking at it. I may go back to it / I may not. I want the colours to break up into segments, become abstracted and then for the image to join back up into a still life / shape again. Well, that is the intention anyway.

Again, it has been a life interrupting day but trying to embrace rather than fight against. Meandering is a word that has been mentioned throughout the last two days. I plan to meander, keep on getting lost and that is ok.

For this three-day period, my initial intention was for me to have some space and time in the studio – with my paintings – and no pressure. I feel like I am achieving this aim.

Edy Fung:

Day 2 is when I start to feel I’m entering the headspace better closer to a physical residency, more successfully reducing the level of stimuli down to 1%? Definitely 0.01% of that of yesterday!

The fact that (accelerating) communications, profiling, finance, logistics, coordination, PR is the nature of an artist’s life isn’t going to go away. The everyday will play a part in your work whether you accept that or not.. When things aren’t working the way they should, problems will still be there whether I become anxious, feel overwhelmed, worry about making others disappoint or not. It’s not completely there yet but I feel my body tidying up what it experienced, building new ‘muscles’ after having pulled through an assortment of roughness, ready to elevate.

Meteorite, pastel on paper, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, 2021

Tracy Mackenna  & Edwin Janssen:
On the second day of our residency with Stefanos we have collectively developed a format for the thing that we want to produce.

Although the three of us have known each other for around sixteen years, this is our first opportunity to truly collaborate. A natural fluidity is at play between us, buoyant in a rich density of understanding, surprising references and common values.

The imagery and material that we are generating reveals to us a shared ‘grounding’; rural architectural structures, Greek mountain tea, paper samples, colour palettes, pastel-blackened fingers.

In spite of the screen as an active distancing device, we are able to create a closeness that is beautiful in its unexpectedness.

Danica Maier:

A day of thinking through writing and drawing. Up very early and writing before I had a chance to pre-think it away or have the day intrude too much into my thoughts. Then drawing, and more drawing, reading, quoting, capturing and more writing. Reminding myself to play.

The un-re-peating-repeats are variations and difference within a recurrent pattern.  The un-re-peating repeat can be/contain hidden variants within repetitions and patterns.

The unrepeating repeat can be found both within the decorative, and objects around us, as well as sounds and music, actions we engage with, cycles of life.

When is the moment that the un-re-peating repeat might lapse into chaos…  Or does it…

un- | ʌn | prefix 1 denoting the reversal of an action or state

re- | riː, ri, rɛ | prefix 1 once more; afresh; anew

un-re- reversal, once more

Michelle McKeown:

At the beginning of the day I stand outside for some forty minutes in the chill spring air just absorbing what seems like a very rare spell of April sunshine –watching the frenetic activity of the countless birds busily collecting moss and dried grass for this year’s nest. I wonder at their industriousness and their process of selection.  Why moss from that particular corner? why that specific bundle of dried grass?  I think. I admire their resourcefulness, the way they comb the environment for what is close to hand (or beak, should I say) gathering their found materials,  to repurpose and build from.  I think a lot about how artistic practice mimics this opportunism and scavenging, whether it be ideas, motifs, images, materials, words. It’s always a gathering, a repurposed jumble.  Later, I wander through parts of east Belfast thinking about the grounding walk we are to do tomorrow.  I try to reccy a rough route I think I might take the next day.  It’s not the sort of place I’m too comfortable just rambling about in.  I skirt around the edge of a housing estate, lots of kids congregating with their bicycles, little girls whip past me towards an ice-cream van that’s just pulled up.  I see some graffiti on a gable-end wall and think of the project which The Museum of Loss and Renewal and   Stefanos are doing during the residency. In the midst of the ubiquitous political scrawlings,  a perfect white spiral winks back at me – like some virtual petroglyph. I take a quick snap to bring back to the studio-nest.  Finally, I arrive at the studio. I find some old student quality acrylic and mix the pigment. I mix for some minutes achieving a nice shade of mud. Ready to start painting now.

Stefanos Pavlakis:
On the second day of my residency with Tracy and Edwin we have collectively developed a format for the thing that we want to produce.

Although the three of us have known each other for around sixteen years, this is our first opportunity to truly collaborate. A natural fluidity is at play between us, buoyant in a rich density of understanding, surprising references and common values.

The imagery and material that we are generating reveals to us a shared ‘grounding’; rural architectural structures, Greek mountain tea, paper samples, colour palettes, pastel-blackened fingers.

In spite of the screen as an active distancing device, we are able to create a closeness that is beautiful in its unexpectedness.

Working in our individual studios we meet three times in the day. Here are our individual reflections and thoughts from the day’s actions and events.

Louisa Chambers: 

Stop, start, stop, start. Working pattern for today. Have not found any sort of momentum as constant life interruptions are – well – interrupting. Buzz, whirl, burr, beep. Sounds from my mobile, car, head.

STOPPPP!

BUT tomorrow is a new day and going to try (if physically and mentally able to) stay all day in the studio – until the final reflections at the EOD.

The Studio. A space to reflect, a refuge for my head and a place to make. Thankful that I have this s/place ATM.

“You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon and it turns into a piece of bread.” 

Quote by Philip Guston (taken from ‘Night Studio memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer’ which I’ve started to read again after a 16-year gap).

Edy Fung:
Never expected the residency will land in the period where new beginnings start but old projects refuse to make an end! I was looking forward to entering a heterotopia with Swallow but disruptions adhered to the day – I guess this is the reality and the challenge for artists to find this luxury of having a headspace. Residencies are a great tool to frame a spacetime experience; for me, the chaos and turbulence were magnified in my mental space as well as through the Zoom camera! I couldn’t be more grateful though that my vulnerability was caught by extremely warm, intellectual, attentive, and supportive artists.

It has been so interesting to hear how everyone navigated their ways to their artistic and professional practice today. I’m thinking mostly about what it is that one learns from art academia? How do art schools teach (that can’t be absorbed by other pathways)? Where is art education heading in the next 5 years? At the moment I’m at the crossroad of many aspects of my life, reflecting on the sustainability of the career and how to “function as an economic unit” (borrowing Edwin’s words) in whichever mode of being suitable for the artist.

(Vlek Plek, pastel on paper, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, 2021)

Tracy Mackenna  & Edwin Janssen:

This online residency is kick-starting our investigation into graffiti, language, translation, and public space. It is the initial stage of a project with fellow resident Stefanos Pavlakis. The outcome, a visual and textual statement, will inform our developing collaboration. When international travel resumes, we will collectively explore the political graffiti in abundance on Athens’ city surfaces. Hosted by Zoetrope (Athens) in 2022, from a public studio for artistic research and exchange, we will curate public events and produce printed matter that will be introduced into the fabric of the city.

Danica Maier:

Day one starts with a ‘clean-up’, a revamp, a revisit to something just (about) finished to help start with the new. I consider how copying and appropriation are so much a part of my practice – that so often there is a starting point to build on or from – even if this is myself.

Trying to start writing and drawing and stringing together a series of others words, my voice. The start is always tricky, foundation work is needed – laying the groundwork to start from, to build on. Terms, keywords and thoughts have been captured, defined and their etymology explored. A structure is beginning to (perhaps) emerge.

Repetition and pattern. Repetition and attention. Repetition and variation. Repetition and labour.

Variant reiterations and unrepeating repeat.

Un- / Re-

Michelle McKeown:

I’m working towards a two person show with fellow artist and friend Alan McMahon scheduled to open in  QSS Belfast this summer. Our working title is ‘Becoming Undone’.

I begin the day with the good intention that I will devise a new colour palette;  that I’ll observe McMahon’s  glitched photographs more closely;  that I’ll amend those painted studies that  have been waiting for my attention on the studio floor for the last week.  Then, the inevitable occurs,  I stumble on a small note I scribbled a month or two before – a sketchy sort of observation of a  mathematical model of the torus.  The torus becomes the torc – the torc becomes La Tène and  before I know it, between the leafy tendrils and scrolls of  my La Tène drawing, there emerges a familiar pattern I remember  –  diffraction. I drift but I invariably always seem to come back around again, close to somewhere that  I thought I left behind. Discussions with the group make me think about this spiralling back and accept this nachträiglichkeit as part of the process, nonetheless I wish it was different, more strategic, more to plan.   The colour palette remains undeveloped, the studies unworked, the plan undone.

Stefanos Pavlakis:

This online residency is kick-starting our investigation into graffiti, language, translation, and public space. It is the initial stage of a project with fellow resident artists Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen. The outcome, a visual and textual statement, will inform our developing collaboration. When international travel resumes, we will collectively explore the political graffiti in abundance on Athens’ city surfaces. Hosted by Zoetrope (Athens) in 2022, from a public studio for artistic research and exchange, we will curate public events and produce printed matter that will be introduced into the fabric of the city.