RSA RESIDENCIES FOR SCOTLAND 2011
I have the pleasure in writing to you to inform you that the RSA residencies for Scotland panel have awarded you a bursary to undertake a residency at Cromarty Arts Trust… The panel was very impressed by your application and are delighted to offer you this opportunity… I would like to congratulate you once again on your award. We very much look forward to working with you over the next few months…..
A slow smile crept across my face developing into an aching grin as I jubilantly declared ‘yes! Yes!’ (to unfortunately no ones ears but my own). The smile still goofily lingers today and flickers back into a wide mouth grin when I recall my residency request will soon become a reality.
[THE REQUEST]
‘A month long summer residency with Cromarty Arts Trust would allow me to engage with an intense period of art making. My recent nomadic lifestyle means I have been unable to create the large sculptures and costumes that have been the keystone of my practice, and I am keen to once again grapple with the physicality of materials. The large Game Store studio at Cromarty is an ideal space for exploring a materials inherent properties, allowing for combination of traditional art materials with items gathered from the local parish, enjoying mutations and reactions between the two, both real and imagined. I want to bring what I saw in the markets of Piazza dei Ciompi to my sculptures and installations, irrelevant objects from forgotten rituals built into a shrine for the everyday and obsolete.
When living in Florence I was confronted with an unsettling duality around the way women were perceived. The mother/whore complex flickered between candle lit shrines to the Virgin Mary and the sequined panties of the female talk show hosts. Intriguingly I found this duality played on in a character I had previously found in local folklore, the She-Wolf. Idolised as the maternal Capitoline Wolf, yet represented as an icon of lust and adultery in Dante’s Inferno, the She-Wolf is a character suffering from a restless duality. I want to re-release the She-Wolf back into the highlands, creating a narrative combined with ideas of alchemy discovered at the Galileo museum, the peculiar collectors at the Florentine flea markets and my own passion for metamorphosis.’
What’s more, Cromarty is in close proximity to a highland wildlife park that a wolf pack calls home, so I’ll be up there as often as possible sketching and filming the animals – I’m absolutely delighted I’ve been offered this opportunity!
For now I will continue my project here in Northumberland. Unfortunately due to personal reasons I’m unable to move back to Glasgow for another few months so I’ll be trying to sink my teeth into Newcastle’s contemporary art scene. This week I will be meeting up with some art school graduates living in Newcastle to see what they’ve done post graduation, hopefully I’ll come away with a good idea about what I can involve myself in and what opportunities I can create for myself here. I haven’t stopped making art since I can home from Italy, and although I must admit the paintings I’m making in my parents attic are not going as well as I hoped, I’m getting results I’m interested in from my 35mm studies and some smaller sculptural pieces are worth investigating further. Filming in my local parish woods has been a wonderful experience and soon I’ll have to face the mammoth task of clearing out my computers hard drive so I can finally transfer my tapes to a digital format and see what images I’ve captured. Exciting!
What’s next
What’s next?
How can I begin to process this mass of visual information and inspiration I acquired while on residency in Florence? I’m still reeling from the unsettling duality of woman’s position in Italy, and the mass amount of historical objects, some granted a position of adoration and some left to decay down the graffitied side streets. How will I take what I experienced in Italy and apply it here in the UK? What will come out of the commonalities and tensions between the ritualised Catholic religion of Tuscan life and the rural lore and superstitions I’ve found here.
I spent Christmas with my family in the North of England and already I could feel the Italian ideas of ritual and idol pumping through my work. Small pilgrimages out to the woods led to a playful take on shrines; using birthday candles, pop socks and bacon to build miniature offerings to fallacious deities. I want to push this further mimicking the market shops at Piazza dei Chompi, enjoying how the accumulation of everyday objects built up into a bizarre alters to the obsolete and outdated. Tools becoming detached from their original purpose as they become appreciated for aesthetics alone and get recycled into new instruments.
A couple of weeks ago I met with Will Maclean, Bill Scott and Dick Cannon in Edinburgh to submit the work produced in Florence. I handed over a book I’d produced showcasing my 35mm photographs and I can now proudly say that I have work in the Royal Scottish Academy Permanent Collection. The day was also a chance to catch up with the other John Kinross Scholars and talk about the London show, which has now be officially titled ’WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE’. It’s all getting rather exciting and although the RSA can’t offer us any financial support, they’ve kindly offered to promote the show on their website which is brilliant.
So for now it’s on with the art making and on with the art showing! What surprised me while I was away was the how valuable this blog was as a tool for clarifying my thoughts. So with that in mind I’m going to keep up dating this a-n blog as I work on my show in London and seek out further artistic endeavours.
Now, to get a studio, and a job, and a flat… perhaps not in that order…
Around Firenze I wander eager to seek out new places in a city that’s become familiar. Following the winding streets north I discover a park and in its centre a carousel. The park is deserted but the lights of the carousel are on, its glowing like a jar of fireflies amongst the dark trees, now bare after their remaining leaves lost their defiant stand against the winter wind. The carousel, behind its glass walls, echoes the specimens in the Specola, in a state of suspended death floating in formaldehyde.
Preservation is a notion that has run through my photographs; exploring what has been preserved and what has been left to natural decay. The restoration work in Firenze is perpetual, over the last few months I’ve seen paintings disappear and reappear on the walls of the Uffizi as they are shuttled away into darkened rooms to under go repainting and primping.
The preservation work on the old buildings is continuous, scaffolding inches around the Duomo’s walls constantly cleaning in what seems a herculean task. The resulting timeless nature of these buildings has a bit of a strange effect on me.
I sit on a bench in the middle of Piazza Santa Croce but instead of having a de Chirico-esk moment of joyful epiphany, I muse upon my own insignificant lifespan, acknowledging the probability that the building in front of me will remain of centuries, despite how many floods Mother Nature throws at it.
Perhaps this is where my affection for the decaying, the forgotten and the thrown away stems from. Getting a perverse sense of pleasure from outlasting something in the city of monuments to the past.
written 10th December 2010
Battles in a bedroom studio.
My search for a comfortable way to paint in my small Italian bedroom has had me sprawled across the floor, utilising hairbrushes and playing cards as make shift easels and even dismantling my desk and turning it upside down. My latest venture has involved a liberated advertising board (Klorane Gel Douche – five new scents!) from the Farmacia down the street (probably my most successful idea).
Knowing I’m beginning to push my luck if I want my paintings to dry in time before I leave I set yesterday aside to really get down and messy with the painting one last time here in Firenze.
And I think I had a bit of a break through. I learnt how to reuse turps (let it settle, pour of the clear liquid, I guess really I’d always known this, I watched my friends do it in studio last year but somehow it took this long to apply this method myself). I have begun to appreciate different brushes for different marks, which again seems so straight forward but I’d just been using which ever brush had the right colour on it, or one close to the right colour. I also learnt how to clean brushes, swirl them in brush cleaner. Again a big ‘well duh’ but strangely before I’d just been giving them a wipe if I wanted a big change in colour, or just letting the paint sit on them and grow hard, try to soften it up with some fresh paint if I wanted to use that brush again.
I’m aware that I’m coming across like a bit of a div. Perhaps I could of made ‘better’ paintings from the start if I’d read a manual – but where’s the fun in that?
The more I want from my painting, the more I’m pushing myself to get it.
My battle with painting is still underway and I’m witnessing the graffiti reside of the student unrest here in Firenze filtering into my work. Stencilled iconography and cryptic messages are butting heads and slipping in behind paint runs and splashy streaks of colour. I’ll be leaving Firenze in a week so I have conceded to just work on one more painting, and even though I am just working in my tiny bedroom here I don’t know the next time I will have a space to get out my paints so I’m going to use the next few days to really experiment with this new medium: (after which I should probably give it time to dry before I roll it up and ship it back to the UK). Back to the UK, typing it just then made it seem real. Oh boy. I am going to miss this!
Still, I must admit, there are a lot of things in the UK to look forward to. I am currently in conversation with a London Gallery space as we’re in the early stages of organising an exhibition in the spring focused on the work produced in and inspired by my residency in Firenze, so I’ll keep you posted as that unfolds.
