My residency day in Colne took place on Friday and it was a mixed experience for me. For the past year I’ve had my heart set on a residency believing it to be the key to finding out where my career was headed and making some new work. I wanted to relocate for a short period and immerse myself in a new location to be inspired, scared and creatively energised. So far my applications for residencies have pretty much fallen flat however this self-development bursary gave me the opportunity to set my own self-directed residency and this was an exciting prospect for me. I understand that a one day (not even staying over night) residency is not really the same as what I was originally seeking. The time and space is very limited and really has to be shoe-horned into my existing schedule much like my current working practice however as I was labelling it a residency and changing location for the day that excitement still remained. I may have been carried away by the romanticism of travelling somewhere and spending the day drawing, photographing, writing and recording. Don’t get me wrong I did enjoy the process however as it was the first time that I’d done it probably ever I was pretty terrible at sticking to my plans and this disappointed me.
I have a bad habit of putting a lot of pressure on myself to make the best of everything and this trait can sometimes make it difficult to take a step back and stop thinking. I convinced myself that my day in Colne was going to be hugely productive and experimental; I had plans for all types of documentation and pictured myself at the end of the day with a stack of research and hundreds of photographs to work with. This was naive of me – Colne is just not that interesting and I am just not that good at documentation.
Throughout the day the tasks felt very forced and the actions of looking and recording were not coming naturally to me. I have a feeling that there may have been a number of factors to blame for my lacklustre efforts but mainly it was my indifference towards Colne and my natural tendency towards only making work if I believe it to be useable or useful in the long run. For example the majority of Colne is residential streets – some of these are very pretty terraced houses and some are quite ugly houses, there are some nice streets and some not so nice streets and once I’d taken a few photos I didn’t really see much point in continuing to meticulously document each new street I came across. Initially I saw this as a failure on my part to engage with the residency protocol (or what I believed was the residency protocol – I don’t think this is something that exists) and I was irritated with myself for being lazy – I did some drawings but I didn’t feel inspired to draw everything and anything and even sometimes lost interest mid drawing because I just didn’t see the point. After some time at home to think however I have decided that there is nothing wrong with what I did in Colne. It is absolutely fine that I found the town quite boring and uninspiring (no offence to the people of Colne, this is not an attack) and that was in fact just my experience of the place and my first impressions which was actually the entire point of the exercise anyway. The photographs that I’ve taken (about 130) the few sketches made and the words scrawled out every few steps will be used in some way and my visit will inspire new work which was also one of the main aims of the trip and the project.
Next week (most likely Tuesday) I’ll post some of my research from the day and update further on the next stage of the project.
