Back in UK and off to Cornwall for a week long residency at Cape Cornwall. I took more kit than anyone would need but set myself FOUR challenges
1. To not make final outcomes
2. To play as much as possible with Mark-making
3. To leave the audience at the door
4. To get over my fear of painting outside in a rural setting.
I achieved them all….and ate lots of pasties
Whilst I had set an idea for my residency when I first applied in 2016life had taken a number of turns before I could attend Brisons, as such my ideas had broadened. In retrospect I am really glad they had as I feel my experience was much deeper and more profound as a result. My work has dealt with the urban environment, industrial architecture, the effects of time and tide on the built environment, decay etc for a number of years. During the course of the last year I have experience a major shift in my life, and work. As a result I am painting more intuitively, planning and researching less (life is too short) and generally trusting the process. However I had identified two areas that I wanted to work on at Brisons, the first being mark-makingI had lost the joy of simply making marks, and the second was to resist the temptation to make finished pieces, by that I mean leave the audience at home and just focus on responding to what for me, as a city girl, is a very new environment. So, whilst I still focused on the industrial heritage of the area, and delighted in it, I also found new ways of working, explored a wide range of mark-making media and techniques, for the first time drew and painted in a rural environment, and developed an exciting approach of cutting and tearing my drawings and sketches to create compositional sketches in collage form. There were so many lessons learn and so much achieved that its hard to pin down. Overall an increased confidence to respond and play, to trust the process of gathering and creating, to make work for me, for the sheer joy and delight in it, to embrace a new environment and see what occur!.
