Working in our individual studios we meet three times in the day. Here are our individual reflections and thoughts from the day’s actions and events.
Louisa Chambers:
The collaborative walks this morning between Berlin, Lincolnshire, Glasgow, Nottingham, Belfast and Stockholm – helped me to really focus in the studio today. I had no life interruptions – perhaps being a Saturday. Today was a good day.
Started to work on another small painting which intentionally acts as a pair with the other one that I have (I think) finished. Enjoying layering up the colour segments again slightly changing tones. The coloured shapes are interacting with one another either clashing or harmonising.
Trying not to adjust and rework the other painting. I need to leave it to be.
This three-day period has reenergised me, a time of connections and meeting of a new group of people albeit virtually. Likewise, the residency has allowed me to have some time alone, reflect and make – and I am thankful for this.
Edy Fung:
Thinking about languages, (disrupting) repetition, looping, pattern recognition in the visual, sonic, and verbal. Is this ability to move horizontally and map connections across abstract ideas and anecdotes simultaneously still unique to human beings? It must be! It is something at the moment cannot be replaced by an A.I., who is still only very good at performing one specialist thing very well at a time. I hope to uncover more artistic values belonging to a human being that can remain in the future.
Powder Tips, pastel on fingers, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, 2021
Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen:
On this final day of the residency we have fine-tuned our way of working together.
Crucial decisions have been made about the thing that we are working on. We now have two weeks to finish it. Today has been spent on bringing drawing and photography together through digital collage: revealing visual poetry through designed pairings.
The ability to produce the thing requires a high level of trust and generosity, and the appreciation of the other.
The thing, in the form of printed matter, will be gifted to our fellow residents in advance of our final virtual residency session, on 8th May 2021.
Danica Maier:
Great to start the day with a group walk. Walking together (during various types of lockdowns) in Glasgow, Belfast, Stockholm, Nottingham, Berlin and Waddington – lovely interconnections were made, birds from far off locations were heard and traffic from other cities/countries startled me as I walked down my empty village street. Being together when separate while outside in the cold sunshine.
This final day felt a good conclusion as thoughts and ideas come together to be more of a starting point – I end the residency feeling like I can now ‘begin’. Most of the morning was spent reading my writing, thinking about it and tweaking it around. Then after an interesting and meandering lunchtime discussion that touched on – language, understanding/ comprehension, how we ‘think’ and see, layering, sound and music, and so on – I spend the afternoon working on drawings.
This was great to focus on various iterations of fragments and layered drawings. Revisiting and reworking, relaying and overlaying, gaps and mismatches, small and smaller, pink and red, blue and blue.
Michelle McKeown:
I wake up to another luminous azure sky in Belfast and get ready for our ‘grounding’ walk. I make my way towards the greenway in east Belfast. A virtual dérive is not something I’ve ever taken part in before and I feel excited about the prospect of what is to follow. Sure enough the sensation is not so much grounding as one of compelling atomisation as I catch glimpses Berlin; Glasgow; Stockholm; Nottingham and rural England, all simultaneously. I return to the studio. There I initiate another kind of grounding and take up a brush to begin the dark ground of a painting. It’s an old study that’s been niggling me for a couple of weeks. I finish it somewhat decisively. After lunch, I ponder the discussion I had with The Museum of Loss and Renewal and Stefanos Pavlakis and I feel grateful for their insight. I think about the current disjunction between my writing and practice, how awkward I feel when trying to express my relationship to practice right now. The suggestion that the unfinished or overbaked quality in my paintings might have significance intrigues me. It’s not something I’d ever considered before. The very possibility makes me smile and laugh at my own resistance, my stubborn refusal to open up to what is staring me in the face, what the work might be trying to tell me. My refusal to acknowledge this aspect of the work, I realise, has been a limiting assumption. I recognise the necessity to re-evaluate my understanding of what it means to finish a painting or an art work. Can it be said that a work is ever really completely resolved or ‘finished’, so to speak, or is it the case that it is infinitely open-ended? Like the spiral?
Stefanos Pavlakis:
On this final day of the residency we have fine-tuned our way of working together. Crucial decisions have been made about the thing that we are working on. We now have two weeks to finish it. Today has been spent on bringing drawing and photography together through digital collage: revealing visual poetry through designed pairings. The ability to produce the thing requires a high level of trust and generosity, and the appreciation of the other. The thing, in the form of printed matter, will be gifted to our fellow residents in advance of our final virtual residency session, on 8th May 2021.
