ARTIST RESIDENCY

This time last year I was artist-in-residence at The Mawddach Art Residency, in remote and rural north Wales. I am very grateful to have been invited to return, for another two weeks, to this amazing place again this January. I returned with loose intentions to pursue the SEVEN SKINS project that began in Mawddach. Although this was the plan, I never hold myself to rigid parameters when I take an art residency – if ever there was a time to wander off the path and go and explore things along the periphery of an area of interest, with none of life’s usual distractions, this is the time and place to do it.

Have a look at the beginning of the SEVEN SKINS series from last year HERE

When I was there, I did continue to pursue some more ‘skin’ coats:  

SEVEN SKINS | Skin Spells: a coat looking at tattooing skin and the stories these hold. Thinking about the pain, the poignancy and perhaps the empowerment of piercing and permanently marking the skin. 

SEVEN SKINS | Kintsugi in Thread: I also continued a piece that I began last year about scars on the skin with a Kintsugi* inspired coat, where I have mended tears in the fabric with red thread stitches to acknowledge and accept the existence of the flaws; highlighting rather than hiding with slow, tenderly made sutures.
*(Kintsugi: The Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold).

I also took with me a few, what I initially thought of as unrelated, un-finished projects to do as a warm-up; to get a bit of creative flow underway.

-  A crow I began a few years ago using a pattern by Ann Wood,

-  A raven, I had pre-cut fabrics and pattern pieces to develop the crow pattern into a much larger raven

-  A Poppet. In October my daughter and I took a trip to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall (UK) it was here that I was reminded of a project I began earlier in the year but didn’t find the time to pursue. In folk magic, a poppet is a doll made to represent a person, for casting spells on them, or aiding that person through magic.  Whilst I am not suggesting that my poppet was made with magical powers, I used it as a way to explore the notion of life influencing art and art influencing life.  Potentially playfully putting a poppet in situations/ideas I might be too uncomfortable or self-conscious to do as myself.

On my work table were all the separate parts from these different projects laying side by side, I noticed unexpected connections between them. To my delight I saw that the crow wings were the perfect scale to be wings of the poppet or sleeves of a tiny poppet coat, this became something I decided to go along with.  Amid writing and research into myths and folktales I also stumbled upon a Harpy-themed** online life-drawing session - what were the chances of that!!!  So, I signed up and had a go.

I begin tentatively exploring the idea of embodying the folktales I was immersing myself in intellectually, and allowing myself 'serious play’ by creating miniaturised versions of the things I had made for my own body, but also leaving space to scale-up ideas that started poppet-sized to become something I might one day be able to wear.
**(Harpy: mythical bird-woman)

For a moment I wondered if I wasn't perhaps minimising myself, shrinking my artistic voice into one of a childish doll, but that doesn't feel true.  Although I have just begun to explore this idea, I think instead these miniature versions might become more potent in some way because of their smallness; like distilling scents to create a heady perfume or reducing flavours to a taste-dense stock cube.  Who knows, its early days, I'll have to see how I feel about it all on my return to my Bristol studio!

Mawddach Art Residency

I am thrilled to have been selected as an artist-in-residence at Mawddach Residency in the Eryri/Snowdonia National Park in Wales for 2 weeks in January 2024. The images I’ve seen of the surrounding landscape and the artist’s studio that I will be using look stunning and I really can’t wait! In making my proposal it was interesting to contemplate what I might like to work on, it’ll be interesting to see if this changes nearer or during my time there…

Recently I have been making hand-stitched coats that incorporate stories and secrets in their linings. I am hugely inspired by folktales, especially ones where the unexceptional hero must overcome apparently impossible obstacles (spinning straw into gold, silently weaving barbed shirts for seven cursed brothers, finding the way home by following bread crumbs and so on). I am drawn to stories of transformation, whether physical or metaphorical; dramatic and magical or slow and ordinary, like ageing and nature.

On the residency, I would like to develop work which tells my personal story in a broader folkloric style. I am interested in looking at seasons of change, development, and cycles of nature & ageing as I enter the ‘elder woman archetype’ phase of my story and my teenage daughters begin the ‘main character’ phase of theirs. I would like to immerse myself in the slow and therapeutic process of hand-stitching a quilt or an article of clothing that investigates these. I am contemplating the layers of clothing that we put/pass on as we grow, and wrappings that get unravelled and rewoven to hold the subtly transformed bodies that we live in throughout our lives.  Like snakes shedding skin or Russian dolls; bodies nesting inside other bodies; or moths regenerating inside cocoons. I’d be interested to investigate a more performative approach to my work – perhaps filming myself stitching, gathering and processing materials, perhaps even dwelling on the, sometimes futile, attempts of characters in stories to complete their tasks, by making the un-doing and re-doing of the work as important as the initial doing of the work; unpicking, unravelling – how does this alter the materials? What evidence of its previous form does it retain? How do I feel about destroying my work to create new work from it?

One of the reasons residencies are so useful to me is that they offer a safely unpredictable space where I’m able to give myself permission to explore. The magic is always that I don’t know what will come and I don’t want to be overly prescriptive in my expectations of what taking a 2-week residency would achieve - I pick things up as I go, I tell stories as I find them.  I like to arrive with loose plans and lots of resources; opening myself up to the ways that solitude, silence and an inspiring environment guides my work and feeds my practice when I return home.