Day 6 in the Crypt residency just before Christmas. With people going to catch trains and the last visitors dwindling, it was left to me to lock up and close down the crypt. All week it has felt ok to be there – atmospheric rather than alarming, benign rather than disturbed. All of a sudden, my imagination jumps out at me in giant loops of alarm, as if all the shadows are suddenly populated. I decide I can leave – right now. There’s not much left to gather up, so I take my bags to the entrance, but I have to go back, into the cupboard, to turn off the main lights, and then into passageways and room to turn switches, leaving a swirling magnetic dark behind me. I pull the slow, enormous door against that blackness, the whole place having changed its nature.
It turns out that a six day residency is plenty of time to go through some cycles of thought and experimentation, to try out a few things, and follow ideas to conclusions. I found it really valuable, to have that precious time and space to think about nothing but what I was doing, and to follow every artistic impulse. Keeping the resources limited helped me to find more shades of meaning in a few sheets of tissue paper and some threads. Taking all those photographs is looking, looking, looking. I have a great amount of material to process in time, and new ideas for exhibitions and proposals and so on. I have a couple of new things which are part of my art practice repertoire – the wrapping, and also the solid standing shadows – solidified. I have some ideas for making wrapped shadow brooches. I will update here in due course.
We revisit the same sorts of ideas in different iterations and aspects, and find new shades or angles, and perhaps new forms, incorporating more ideas along the way. It’s great to get the chance to have some intense time, especially not having an actual studio. I normally write a great deal in such situations or projects, but found this time I was doing, doing, doing.
