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.
