Yesterday was the first day of my residency. It's an ongoing residency with no fixed timeframe or expected outcome, and allows me to work in the cyclic way that I have come to really appreciate and value.
Resonancy
I came across the term Artist in Resonance when researching ways of listening, and participating in a Co-Listening session with Dancing on the Edge's Year of Listening. I want to hold this different naming as a kind of guiding principle alongside the more traditional phrase "Artist in Residence", as it speaks to me of a widening and opening up of the role, and I hope that it will continually remind me to notice resonance and discord as I am working and to look outwards toward resonant connections as well as inwards.
Mapping the space and taking in its imprints
The first day was about getting to know the space through movement and tracking the passage of light.
How do we get to know a building, with all its layers of history? How do we make space for the building's agency, legacy, and its place in the community and landscape to be heard? How do we remain open, to the best of our ability, to all experience and belief systems to be in reciprocal relationship and let the work unfold? I'll be drawing on practices of yielding, listening, and sensing with the body to try and hear what kind of work I need to make here.
In these images I am exploring relationship with windows as borders, boundaries, lenses, emissaries of light and darkness, gatekeepers of the view between inner and outer worlds.
In x-church the windows start above head height. I am exploring and sensing how this impacts the space and way of being when inside and outside.
I love working with shadows, which to me is a way of exploring the position of the human, recognising its transience and fleeting presence, playing with darkness and light. It lends itself to the element of surprise in image-making, such as finding these parquet floor tiles intersecting the shadow of the body to blur the boundaries between building and person.
As the work progresses I will be using this web page to record and share aspects of this residency/resonancy as well as posting some updates on social media.
In other news, you can find some of my writing featured in Nature's Way online exhibition, alongside painting, photography and video works by artists from many different countries.