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!
